


the blood of the covenant (both thick and sweet)

by possiblythreefourthspeahen



Category: Hellsing
Genre: Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Multi, Multiple Pov, Polyamory, Romance, Time Skips, and vampire hunters, canon typical language, canon typical violence (eventually), musings on monstrosity and humanity, one ace lesbian human and her two disaster bisexual vampires, references to dracula and frankenstein and other gothic literature, the domestic lives of vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2019-10-21 03:09:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17634902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possiblythreefourthspeahen/pseuds/possiblythreefourthspeahen
Summary: Seras lost one family when they were killed in front of her. When she was killed, she gained a new one... not that any of them realize it for a long, long time.Or, they're in love and loving but they're also all dunderheads."If she had really thought about it, she’d have thought things would go back to normal. Then she would have thought longer about it – what with the whole thirty years she could have spent ruminating on the topic – and remembered that there wasn’t a normal at Hellsing and never had been. Still, she hadn’t thought the strangeness would come from Seras."





	1. Integra

**Author's Note:**

> So I've long been a Hellsing fandom lurker and decided to finally write something for it. I haven't watched the anime or OVA, only read the manga and fanfic, but I'm trying to keep it true to the manga. Feedback would be appreciated.

 

If Integra had thought about it seriously, she would have thought things would go back to normal once Alucard returned. She hadn’t really considered it, though; somewhere around year 12 she stopped believing he’d return in her lifetime. Seras was the believer – she believed in things like _aliens_ and _the Loch Ness Monster_ and even more improbable things like _justice_ and _fairness_ and _innate human kindness_ and most of all she believed that her Sire would return eventually. Integra looked at the facts, shook her head, and continued on with her life, grousing comfortably about that good-for-nothing vampire whose coffin took up space in her basement and who seemed in no hurry to get back and wasn’t that just typical? Occasionally that sort of talk grew gloomy and melancholy. She had to admit to herself that the complaints became bitterer as time went on – especially after she hit forty – but mostly it was just a thing to say, akin to discussing the weather.

 

If she had really thought about it, she’d have thought things would go back to normal. Then she would have thought longer about it – what with the whole _thirty years_ she could have spent ruminating on the topic – and remembered that there wasn’t a normal at Hellsing and never had been. Still, she hadn’t thought the strangeness would come from Seras.

 

....

 

30 years ago

 

“Why do you have a basket of eggs?” Seras was spinning in a rolling chair in a small portable office situated beside the wreckage of the Hellsing manor. It was barely more than cardboard walls on a shipping frame but it was the best they had while waiting for renovations in London to reach a point when domestic renovations could begin.

 

“I told you, we’re going to practice together – I’m working on aiming with one eye and you’re working on not crushing things with your shadow arm.” A guilty look crossed the vampire’s face as she darted a glance at a mangled but still working doorknob. Most such casualties didn’t survive. There wasn’t the budget anymore to replace things willy-nilly and if it still worked it still got used. Integra believed that applied to herself and Seras as much as it did to things like cars and guns.

 

She set the eggs down on the desk and waved Seras to the far side of the room. She went obediently, pushing the rolling chair with her heels until she hit a flimsy wall.

 

“Why eggs? Why not ping pong balls or water balloons or something? Those are food, you know, it’s kinda wasteful.”

 

Integra shook her hair out of her face. “It is not. Either I throw them properly and you catch them properly and the eggs are still useable or one of us messes up and you get to practice cleaning up with your shadows. Besides, there’s chickens everywhere around here lately as part of the post-London victory gardens. Now catch!” The arcing trajectory was way off, but since Seras dove to catch the egg Integra decided to be more amused than disappointed. “You’re supposed to use your shadow arm,” she chided.

 

“Sorry,” Seras said, not sounding sorry at all. “Your turn!” The egg came winging at her faster than Integra expected. Despite grabbing for it, the egg hit her shoulder and crumpled, spilling yolk and white down her previously pristine suit. Her lip curled into a disgusted sneer at the feel of the egg leaking through the fabric. It curled further when Seras’ shadow cleaned the egg off and took the top layer of cloth off with it, leaving a hole in her suit jacket and a soggy shirt. With great enthusiasm she spent the next half hour attempting to hit the vampire in the face with an egg, but Seras was too fast for her. By the end of it they were both spattered with small shards of egg shell and sticky from egg whites, but Seras no longer broke the eggs she caught with her shadow hand and Integra’s aim was marginally better.

 

....

 

“Don’t scratch,” Seras said, and Integra lowered the hand that had been creeping towards the bandages over her eye.

 

“How did you know?”

 

Seras shrugged. “Stitches always itch and Pip said his annoyed the hell out of him when he lost his eye.” Integra huffed.

 

“It _itches_ ,” she scowled, hand rising again. Seras rolled her eyes and stepped forward, standing right in front of her boss.

 

“Don’t touch it, you’ll open the stitches. Hold still.” Curious, Integra did, allowing Seras to lift off the eye patch and unwrap the bandages. Then her cool hand covered the healing wound, so lightly it felt more like mist than a flesh and blood hand. Seras’ shadows lay quietly at her side as she kept most of her hand still, but her thumb gently stroked an uninjured spot next to the stitches. Despite not touching the stitches, the itchiness faded as if she’d scratched them and the coolness of Seras’ skin seemed to leach away the sensitivity. Integra’s other eye closed as she relaxed under the vampire’s touch.

 

“Why are you so cold? You shouldn’t be if you’re feeding regularly.” The long silence that answered the statement had Integra cracking her good eye open to glare at Seras. “You _are_ feeding regularly.” Seras grimaced. “ _Why_?”

 

“The humans need it more,” Seras said. “If it isn’t cleared for medical use I’ll take it, but most of it is going to hospitalized survivors or wounded first responders. It’s not like there’s much fighting at the moment, anyway, and I didn’t drink much before,” she said on a rush of breath. “I’m not a glutton like my – I don’t need as much blood. I can handle this, I’m not starving myself for no reason. Don’t worry about me, I’m not doing anything strenuous.”

 

Integra hummed disbelievingly, the brow over her uninjured eye rising. “So those reports of a red eyed angel lifting tons of debris clear during search and rescue efforts are about some other blonde, one armed vampire?” Had Seras’ hand not been pressed to her face, she wouldn’t have noticed the small flinch, but she definitely would have seen the flash of shiftiness that swiftly turned into a mask of ignorant innocence. “ _Seras_.” The mask dropped and the vampiress heaved a long sigh.

 

“I took an oath to protect people, you know. ‘Uphold the safety and wellbeing of London communities’, if you want to be technical. I’m still a police girl at heart.”

 

Integra’s scowl faded. “You were supposed to be looking for ghouls.”

 

“Pip was on it! I had him patrolling the city while I, uh, shifted things around a little. Besides, with my senses I was way more helpful finding survivors than the rescue dogs they were using, and I got to practice with my shadows, so – so it’s win-win, right? Like with the eggs!” Seras nodded sharply at the end of her little speech and gave Integra a small, sheepish smile. Integra rolled her eye.

 

“Very well then, Police Girl. But,” she said sharply after seeing Seras’ shoulders slump in relief, “you will go back to drinking blood regularly. That is an order. Am I clear?”

 

Seras withdrew her hand to give a jaunty salute. “Sir yes sir!” The effect was promptly ruined by an impish wink. “Feeling better, sir?” Integra blinked and took stock.

 

“Yes, I am. Thank you, Seras.”

 

....

 

In the time following the attack on London, Seras seemed to be everywhere, hovering nearby as Integra methodically worked her way through problem after problem through all hours of the day and night. Fundraising efforts to rebuild Hellsing. Ceremonies that she had to coordinate in honor of the fallen. Round after round of interrogations with PMs and military leaders about how Millennium had managed to amass such a force to attack London, more meetings and then hearings about Hellsing’s responsibility to prevent such a thing and whether their failure constituted criminal neglect to the point of treason. Discrediting reports, including from eye witnesses, that claimed vampires and “zombies” had been behind the whole affair. Exceedingly terse communications with the Vatican and other occult organizations over keeping the supernatural in line in her territory with Hellsing so diminished – “ _vanquished_ ” in the words of one over-confident emissary who quickly learned that Integra Hellsing and Seras Victoria were strong enough to carry on the organization all on their own and hand him his ass in their minimal downtime.

 

It just went on and on and on, catching a scant few hours of rest every few days, constantly moving from one office to another and then back to the shattered shell of her home. Seras seemed to expand to take up the background of Integra’s life to make up for the absence of Walter, Alucard, and her soldiers. If Seras wasn’t glaring or smirking at Integra’s enemies from over her shoulder, she was bringing her master’s master tea or food or her medicines or nagging at her to rest. The police girl took over writing her reports and recruiting her soldiers so smoothly that Integra hadn’t noticed, too caught up in the whirlwind of her life. By the time she came through to the other side, Seras had arranged for the training of new recruits – a mix of military and police operatives, along with a few recovered Geese – and delegated so much of the paperwork that had previously been Integra’s responsibility that she’d been left with frustrating hours with nothing to do. That had lasted less than a fortnight before Seras started bringing her ridiculous vampire romance novels and cajoling her into watching some inane show or another and generally making sure she didn’t have so much peace and quiet that it drove her insane. 

 

Even after things settled down, Seras hovered. It had taken Integra an embarrassingly long time to realize that the young vampire stayed close because she needed Integra to be her anchor as much as Seras was Integra’s, one constant point of reference in a reeling, dizzying world.   

 

....

 

20 years ago

 

“I’m going with you.”

 

“No, you’re not,” Integra said for the umpteenth time.

 

“I am.”

 

“No.”

 

“ _Yes_ , sir.”

 

“ _No_ , Police Girl.” The vampire’s shadows snaked around Integra to block the door.

 

“The last time you went on a trip like this you were kidnapped and it was as much luck –” Integra’s disgruntled protest interrupted her only briefly “– _as much luck_ as skill that you managed to kill your captor and escape before his reinforcements showed up.”

 

“I am a skilled swordswoman and master markswoman and –”

 

“You can be the most skilled human in the world,” Seras bit out, “the most skilled and the luckiest and it won’t make any difference because you have to be more skilled and lucky every goddamn time but your enemies only have to be more skilled or luckier once, sir, and then you’re dead and Hellsing crumbles. You are. _Not_. Going. Alone.” The shadows blocking the door grew wild, curling and snapping like a writhing horde of snakes. Tendrils formed a solid shield of angry shadow furled closely around Integra and Seras’ red eyes blazed with barely suppressed fury.

 

Integra’s first reaction was a creeping form of icy rage the likes of which she had never turned on the vampire. Her breath hissed between her teeth when she drew in air and her jaw was clenched hard against the instinctive snarl that lodged in her throat.

 

“You’re not invincible either, Seras, and especially not against bishops. You will not be welcomed to the York Minster, much less allowed to listen at Archbishop of York’s throne during his service. The holy power –”

 

“The holy power of the archbishop of Canterbury didn’t bother me at all when I accompanied you a couple years ago,” Seras interjected hotly.

 

“That was in his quarters, his informal office, not his cathedral!”

 

“I went to the cathedral too, Sir, to keep an eye on you during _that_ service and I will be there for this one, as well, and that’s that. You can try to tie me up, shut me in, shoot me in the face and I will still be by your side when you get to York and that’s that.”

 

Integra’s lips pursed as she considered that. She hadn’t realized Seras had followed her into Canterbury Cathedral – it reminded her again how strong she was, especially for so young a vampire. What really brought her up short was the tone, though. Beneath the snapping temper was… fear.

 

She thought of all the times Seras had stumbled back in from a mission, looking like something the demonic cat had dragged in, and how the sight made her gut clench with emotions she didn’t care to name. Then she thought of the look on Seras’ face when _she_ had strode into her hall two months ago, muttering invectives as her suit stuck to bloody scrapes and her leg dragged slightly behind her. Seras had whisked her into the infirmary so fast she still wasn’t sure they hadn’t teleported, despite Seras’ claims to the contrary. The already hovering vampire had become downright _clingy_ in the days that followed, staying closer than Integra’s own shadow bothered to, until her skin itched with the feeling of being constantly watched and worried over and she’d finally snapped and ordered the vampire to back off.

 

Unlike Alucard, she’d remembered belatedly, Seras wasn’t actually bound to her. Seras’ generally solicitous and eager to please nature and her own loyalty to Integra kept her at Integra’s side, commanding Hellsing troops and protecting humans from supernatural threats. Alucard would have been forced to retreat by her orders, though he likely would have complained mightily and looked for loopholes. Seras had given her a long, measuring look through narrowed eyes before melting into shadows. She had been able to feel the vampire’s presence close by even after that, but since she wasn’t underfoot anymore she hadn’t given it much thought.

 

Seras was still clinging, she realized. The police girl had just gotten better at hiding it.

 

She still put up a token fight, but once she realized that Seras’ anger stemmed from her anxiety and protectiveness, her heart hadn’t been in it. Seras took advantage of that and argued her way into Integra’s plans as a security detail. Integra arrived in York with a huge golden wolf with one black leg and a service dog vest. She had to admit, having the towering red-eyed beast at her side was reassuring. Seeing the reactions of other people to Seras’ wolf form left her feeling just a tad smug, especially when the uptight prick Sir Benson objected and Seras’ barely audible growl and raised hackles had him scurrying away under the pretense of some belatedly remembered business. Despite that warning growl, Seras remained quiet and well behaved during the service, ignoring the sidelong glances from other attendees at her presence. Integra decided to follow her lead and act completely nonchalant if anyone asked about her sudden need for a service animal.

 

Afterwards, Seras accompanied her to an informal meeting with a few of the Twelve. She was gentle when a very young Penwood toddled over to pet her, letting him poke and prod at her with nothing more than a slowly swishing tail. The boy’s mother apologized profusely when she scooped him up and gave Seras a conciliatory pat on the head that made Integra smirk. However, when Seras sat beside her armchair as she reminisced with Walsh and Irons over cigars and brandy, she found herself absently stroking the wolf’s gold head.

 

She pulled back suddenly, wondering if she’d had too much to drink – it wasn’t proper to take such liberties with one of her servants, regardless of the fact that she wasn’t in her usual form! However, Seras whined and turned her head to rest it in Integra’s lap, red eyes wide and pleading and the very tip of her tail twitching in entreaty. Integra huffed and took a long draw on her cigar before she acquiesced, resting her hand between Seras’ ears and carding her fingers through her thick fur. Seras sighed happily and relaxed under her touch.

 

Irons and Walsh were still boasting, but Integra’s attention had turned back to the Valentine attack and how her embrace had pulled Seras out of her berserker rage. Seras took comfort in touch. She hadn’t noticed before, probably because she rarely touched people – she wasn’t comfortable with having people in her personal space and her icy demeanor kept most of them at bay – but now she wondered if small touches like this would help ease the vampire’s worry. She decided the occasional pat on the shoulder or some such would be worth trying if it would ease Seras’ anxiety.

 

 _That's the only reason_ , she told herself. _Surely. Just to help Seras._

 

Warmth bloomed in her belly and she told herself it was just the brandy. It had nothing at all to do with the solid weight of Seras’ head on her lap or the bone-deep knowledge of just how much Seras cared. It definitely had nothing to do with the thought of holding hands or cuddling with the police girl, which was _far_ beyond what was warranted and even further beyond what was appropriate.

 

Regardless, she stroked the contented wolf through long hours of conversation and leaned heavily on Seras when she took her usual form and helped a tipsy Integra get ready for bed. She thought she felt cool fingers brush her hair out of her face as she drifted off, but then, that was probably a product of her overstimulated imagination.

 

....

 

They had grown close over the years – physically as well as emotionally – and Integra thought she understood Seras, quirks and foibles included. Seras Victoria was cheeky, brash, naïve, loud, and too damn stubborn for her own good. She was also kind, considerate, brave, cheerful, and most of that stubbornness served to protect others, usually to the detriment of her own wellbeing.

 

Teams she headed were likely to survive even the worst of conditions. Hellsing retention rates were up and casualties of personnel and civilians dropped drastically under Seras’ lead; she truly was a police girl at heart, not a feudal warlord turned exterminator or director of a clandestine paramilitary group and it showed in how she operated. She was a good commander – she didn’t have Integra’s or Alucard’s head for war tactics and politics, but she had been well trained at Hendon in investigative skills and her D-11 training made her particularly well suited to lead teams of armed soldiers. She took that training and applied it systematically to Hellsing troops, running them through drills based on previous cases when she wasn’t on a mission or taking care of some supernatural business or other. She kept a close eye on the peaceful paranormal community in London, sometimes serving as their mediator, and from what Integra’s spies and informants told her, Seras had such a formidable reputation that the more unsavory paranormal elements gave her a wide berth. London now had a larger percentage of nonhuman inhabitants than before Millennium as the more peaceful and family minded settled there under her protection, but the active community and Seras herself ensured that there was far less supernatural crime, especially attacks on humans. She was even trying to persuade Integra that letting some of those individuals join Hellsing was a good idea – Integra wasn’t completely convinced, but she had to admit she was more open to the idea than she had been before she’d seen how well the London community could peacefully cohabitate with humans.  

 

Seras liked hackneyed detective stories, sappy and steamy romance novels, action movies with more explosions than plots, and music that drove Integra up the wall, particularly when the vampiress tried to sing along with it – Seras couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. When she wasn’t in uniform she preferred comfortable clothes in bright colors and she adored the cute pajama sets that occasionally ‘mysteriously appeared’ in her laundry. Given half a chance, she’d rope Integra and some of the captains into playing cards or watching telly with her.

 

Seras had long since gotten over her intimidation of Integra. She’d had no problems in communicating with her in the last thirty years, even if the issue was unpleasant or personal. Seras was generally honest and forthcoming… so her reticence on whatever was going on now made Integra suspicious. She watched the vampiress closely to see if she could get to the heart of the matter on her own, but all she could tell was that something was making Seras uncomfortable and that Seras – brash, loud Seras – had responded by hiding behind a quiet, smiling mask and withdrawing whenever she could.

 

....

 

10 years ago

 

Integra remembered complaining to Walter as a teenager that English winters were gloomy. It was dark for sixteen hours a day, the weak winter sun barely made any appearances, and the dreary blanket of clouds almost never bothered to snow. Snow was at least pretty. Instead, the miserly clouds let loose a colder rain than usual if it wasn’t outright sleeting. Integra was no hothouse flower, but the sheer tedium of the winter months dragged on her then.

 

It was astounding that winter didn’t seem to bother her at all now.

 

She and Seras were reading in the library, a fire burning in the fireplace and a steaming kettle of tea on the service tray between them. Seras stretched out on an antique couch as if she were a cat in a sunbeam, shadows curling and foot twitching lazily as she stared into the fire. An Elizabeth Woodcraft book was facedown over the armrest, the couch serving as a makeshift bookmark. Integra had a book of poetry that some well-meaning peer had pressed onto her, saying she needed something to help her unwind. The poems were supposed to be restful. Integra found them boring and turned instead to idle contemplation.

 

The winters hadn’t become any brighter since she was young. The intervening years had not stolen away long hours of darkness and sullen, overcast skies still sleeted or rained more often than snowed. The cold was starting to nag at her joints, too, as if to add insult to injury. The biggest change had to be the company she kept. Her narrowed eye took in the way Seras basked in the firelight. The vampire’s relentless cheer simply _couldn’t_ be the source of her acquired fondness for the season, but Integra couldn’t think what else might have caused it.

 

She shifted her gaze to study the dim room. The library looked like it had been lifted wholescale from one of the historical dramas Seras so enjoyed. Dark wood paneling gave way to dark wood shelves crammed with books. A plush Persian rug stretched out beneath wood and leather chairs before the fireplace. The fussy settee Seras liked so much was all wood flourishes, asymmetrical backrest, maroon velvet, and tufts; she thought it was hideous and couldn’t remember quite how Seras had convinced her to buy the damn thing, much less put it in her beloved library. She snorted softly at the sight of it and Seras flicked her an amused glance, well aware what that particular sound indicated. Instead of launching into their usual long argument on the merits of comfortable wingback chairs versus plush but garish monstrosities, she huffed and turned her attention to the portrait hanging over the mantel.

 

Her father’s blue eyes stared listlessly back at her and his words echoed in her mind. “ _There are many immortal monsters who roam this Earth. When I look at them, I wonder, were they created out of a desire for immortality? Many of them desire war. I've seen them roaming the bloodiest battlefields, but in their battle cries, I hear a craving. I think they cry out, for death. Nosferatu, the No-Life King. His castle, his kingdom, its people, his loved ones, even his very identity; everything was lost. All that remains is a pale shadow, wandering from battle to battle. I have come to believe that those frightening immortals are, in fact, frail, sobbing children."_ She hadn’t agreed with him when she first met Alucard and she didn’t agree with him now, though for two very different reasons.

 

Alucard had seemed invincible when she was a girl. Hell, he pretty much was invincible; if Seras was to be believed, even that mangy, reality-warping catboy hadn’t put him out of commission for good. He hadn’t seemed sorrowful so much as he had bored and unhinged, clamoring for a new battle to break the monotony of the endless nights at Hellsing. He pitted his wits against her orders more for the challenge of getting around them than for defiance’s sake – she knew as much because he’d often look for loopholes, exploit them to flaunt his ability to do so, and then return to following whatever plan was already in place. The biggest exception to that had been Seras herself – and even then, no one had really ordered him _not_ to make new vampires, just to kill the ones causing trouble.

 

Slowly, though, she’d begun to notice the ennui and self-hatred that plagued him. The long, dark hours when she could sense him brooding in her basement, sitting in his chair and staring at nothing in particular for hours on end when he had no missions to distract him. He was eager to mete out death, but she also saw how much he craved death for himself. Then she understood her father and started wondering how to keep the vampire functioning in order to fight on Hellsing’s behalf – his tempestuous relationships with her and Walter had helped, she’d noticed, and as much as he was an absolute jackass, she encouraged that sort of behavior to foster that small spark of vitality in him. On that front, Seras Victoria – world’s worst vampire, according to a very frustrated Alucard after a disastrous training session – had been very helpful, indeed, and Integra had considered the risks of having an uneasy, anxious vampire less than accepting of her new life far outstripped by the benefit of having her most powerful weapon operating in far better form than before. Her neuroses had pulled him out of his brooding torpor. As an added bonus, the Police Girl had already been trained in firearms and hardly consumed any blood then – she required little training that Alucard hadn’t been able to provide and hadn’t impacted the budget. She’d had two frightened, frail immortals at her beck and call, if she were to believe her father.

 

“Do you think he was right?” Seras said, interrupting Integra’s train of thought.

 

“Who?” Integra asked, still thinking of her father.

 

“The Major. You know, about… humanity being essentially a function of will.” Seras’ eyes didn’t stray from the fire. Her pupils had shrunk to pinpricks Integra couldn’t even see from staring into the light and the flames reflected oddly in those red irises, casting them alternately in burgundy and gold. It made the hair on the back of Integra’s neck raise at the eeriness of the sight and it made her fingers curl with some vague longing at the beauty of it. “A human soul and a human will, regardless of the body that it inhabits, defining humanity.” The strain in Seras’ voice made Integra scowl. She’d thought the vampire had long since accepted herself as she was – could Seras really still be holding out hope that she could reclaim her humanity?

 

“No, Seras,” she said, more harshly than she intended. Seras’ eyebrows drew down into a perplexed frown and those fire-blind eyes turned to meet Integra’s gaze. “The Major was a pathetic husk of something that had once been a man, but he wasn’t human in the end, Seras. He hadn’t been human in a long time. And from what we know of him, even when he was human, he was a wretch who couldn’t face the reality of his own death without masking it with notions of glory. He couldn’t even stand to become a vampire, too selfish to risk giving up his blood or, as he believed, possibly his soul – probably he was also too scared to face the possibility of attempting the change and dying instead. That whole so-called war of his –” Integra’s teeth clenched at the thought of all the casualties, all the suffering and death and betrayal that the awful cyborg had machinated – “all of that, _all of it_ , was because he was too scared of the obscurity and finality of a normal death. He wasn’t right about anything, Seras.” She peered hard at her vampire. “None of it. Do you hear me? You aren’t less than him for being a vampire. _Your_ will and _your_ soul aren’t human anymore, but that doesn’t make you a monster. When he was human, his human will and soul didn’t make him less of a monster. Do you understand me?” Seras was so preternaturally still she wasn’t even breathing as she listened to Integra. “Seras. Do you understand?”

 

Seras inhaled sharply and she blinked rapidly. Her eyes shone brightly in the firelight – more brightly than before? Integra couldn’t tell – as she nodded. It took her a couple of tries before she managed to say, “Yes, of course, Integra.” She cast her eyes down, caught sight of her book, and tried to bury herself in the story, but after a few restless minutes without turning a single page, she bid goodnight to Integra and excused herself.

 

Integra watched her go before turning her eye to the fire. She was frankly disappointed that the decades hadn’t shown Seras what she’d just told her. It made her consider the years behind them through a different lens – what had seemed to be fine before she now found unsatisfactory. Further, she felt the need to do something, but didn’t know what would soothe her disquiet. Once upon a time, before Seras and nagging doctors interfered, she’d chain smoke her way through a pack of cigarillos. Now, the fingers of one hand drummed sharply against the chair arm as the fist of the other propped up her head.

 

She didn’t know what Seras needed from her and she didn’t know what she felt the need to do. Confusion and restlessness made her head ache – or perhaps it was the way she was unconsciously grinding her teeth. Her gaze darted up from the fire to the dim painting above it. She knew one thing for sure now – her father had been wrong. Seras was no pale shadow, no sobbing, listless drifter looking for the next chance to die. For a technically dead woman, Seras Victoria possessed the most vitality of anyone she had ever met. This gloomy introspection from Seras unsettled her because she couldn’t remember the vivacious woman ever acting so _muted_. It felt like a cold fist wrapped around her innards as she thought of Seras fading into the listlessness that had plagued Alucard – did it start with evenings like this, ruminating on the words of a long dead madman? She couldn’t let it.

 

A glance at her pocket watch revealed it was yet early – not even eleven at night. She called for a servant to bank the fire and went hunting for her vampire. When she was in such a mood, Seras distracted her. It seemed the least she could do to return the favor.  

 

....

 

The first hint that something had been wrong was Seras’ quick retreat after Alucard’s return. She had apparently slipped away soon after Integra bit her finger to feed the prodigal vampire and she hadn’t returned to speak to Integra or Alucard that night, instead leaving to deal with a slight issue with the London supernatural community, or so she told one of her captains. By the time she finished it was nearly dawn and she called in to say she was staying in London through the day as a guest at the werewolves’ den. She had barely arrived back at the manor when an emergency in the Cairngorms required her attention. It turned out to be an unwittingly turned, and therefore abandoned, fledgling who was as scared and confused about what happened as the humans he’d instinctively attacked for blood. Since he hadn’t killed anyone, Hellsing operatives dispensed first aid and anti-vampire inoculations to his victims while Seras talked him out of a tree and explained the laws governing the inhuman in the UK. She ended up escorting him to a small but respectable coven in Aberdeen – the coven proprietor agreed to report on his progress to Hellsing in general and Seras in particular. Integra had given Seras permission to make her own way home rather than fly back with the troops in the chopper, aware that the young vampire would stop to look for Nessie as she did every time she was in Scotland but unconcerned about it with Alucard back to handle anything major that cropped up. Seras flew in on shadow wings early in the next morning, by which time Alucard had been sent to deal with an Iscariot agent intruding on their territory in Northern Ireland.

 

The next real clue, then, came Tuesday night following Alucard’s return. It had long been their habit to watch the Great British Bake Off together and Seras had never missed on an episode unless she’d been away on a mission. Usually the Police Girl sprawled across the couch in the rec room, often with her head in Integra’s lap and still in her silly jammies, as the two watched and provided their own running commentary and made minor wagers on the outcome. Instead, Seras had been waiting in an arm chair and clutching a thermos of hot tea when Integra arrived. She wore her favorite pajamas, pink plaid flannel with cartoon bats on them, and curled around a hot water bottle. Integra recognized it as her self-comfort set up, but didn’t know why the vampire felt the need to surround herself with soft, warm, soothing things. Integra’s queries met with noncommittal answers, so she turned her attention back to the show. Seras winced dramatically as one of the contestants forgot to add salt to their macarons.

 

“ _What_ are you watching?”

 

The judgmental question made Seras jump a little, but Integra was too focused on watching a contestant faff about with the egg whites – “going to overwork them,” she groused – to pay much mind to Alucard as he leaned on the back of the couch.

 

Before Seras could answer, he turned his scornful gaze on his former fledgling’s pajamas and said, “A vampire does _not_ wear fuzzy, cutesy plaid, Police Girl.” Integra rolled her eyes as Seras huffed.

 

“They do so!”

 

“Do not.”

 

“Do so!”

 

“Do not!”

 

“Do so!”

 

“No, they do not!”

 

Integra took a deep breath to break in, but Seras beat her to it.

 

“Do so, you git, since I’m a vampire and I wear them!” Alucard snorted but didn’t retort, instead phasing through the couch to sprawl next to Integra, his booted feet propped up on the low table before the couch. Integra pushed his feet off, but he put them back up as soon as she turned her attention back to the telly.

 

“Like giant, idiotic, bickering children, both of you,” Integra said, shaking her head mournfully. “I’ll have to be the voice of reason around here, I suppose.”

 

“Weren’t you the one who just told that huge whopper to Sir Penwood to extort a heli out of him?” Seras rejoined. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me who did that, after all. And I’m not the one who put itching powder in Captain Murray’s boots, either.”

 

“Yes you were,” Integra growled.

 

“Ok, yes, but only on your orders, Sir!” Seras said.  

 

Integra sniffed disdainfully. “He deserved it. And we need a new helicopter.” She lifted her nose into the air with a haughty expression to make Seras laugh and was duly rewarded with her muffled giggle.

 

Alucard, apparently unable to bear not being the center of attention, made a grab for the remote. “There has to be something better on than this. Don’t they have televised blood sports yet?” Integra shoved him away with one hand and chucked the remote to Seras with the other.

 

“Behave or be gone, vampire,” she snapped. Seras clutched the remote but remained quiet. Alucard slowed his pestering, though he didn’t stop altogether. She lost count of how many times she knocked his feet off the table or growled at him to hush.  

 

She expected Seras to wheedle her into watching an episode of something else after the Bake Off ended – popular contenders included QI, Mock the Week, and Being Human, though if she was playing hardball, Seras would suggest a David Attenborough documentary. Instead, Seras handed Integra the remote and packed up her water bottle and tea. “You don’t want to watch anything else tonight, Seras?” Integra asked.

 

“Oh, not tonight, Sir. I’ve got a backlog of paperwork to take care of,” she said, waving her shadows absently. “And I promised extra training for our newest recruits, too. I’ll see you in the morning, probably.”

 

“Very well, then. Good night, Seras,” Integra called after the already retreating vampire. Her good eye narrowed in contemplation even as she elbowed Alucard as hard as she could in the ribs, prompting him to bid her good night as well.

 

That pattern repeated again and again – time that she had grown accustomed to spending with Seras was cut short, their usual activities curtailed by the apparent flood of paperwork and prior commitments that had never kept Seras so busy before. When Alucard was away, things returned briefly to normal, albeit with an underlying tension in Seras the whole time, but as soon as he returned she ghosted.

 

Integra contemplated it over the course of the next few months. Was this some sort of territorial vampire issue? Before, Seras had been Alucard’s fledgling. She hadn’t taken his blood, as far as Integra knew, but she had become a master vampire on her own, claiming her power and freedom. She rarely stayed with vampire covens as her power made them uncomfortable in much the same way the presence of wolves made dogs uncomfortable – even if she had no ill intentions, she was more than a match for them and her presence raised their hackles and set their teeth on edge… until they got to know her better. That acclimation period had taken several years for the coven in London. Was Seras now reacting that way to Alucard’s presence?

 

She ran her thumb along the edge of her nails, staring moodily out over the grounds. Her nails were woefully unkempt beneath her gloves – she had become entirely too accustomed to letting Seras file her nails and paint them silly colors during weekly manicures, an exercise that required a great deal of very pleasant contact. She missed sitting face-to-face with Seras and chatting or bickering as the vampire fussed over nail colors and scented lotions, missed feeling the cool solid hand holding hers as misty shadows darted about, missed the physical closeness. She missed Seras dropping by her office to talk, leaving books or sweets on her nightstand, making mischievous comments during meetings so low that only Integra could hear. She missed their card games and teaching Seras fencing. She missed feeling Seras pressed against her while they watched movies or shows and missed Seras brushing and braiding her hair and she particularly missed when Seras caught her sleeping at her desk and carried her to bed. Something had to give here, because Integra would not let this continue – she had precious few indulgences that she allowed herself, weathered old battleax that she was, and Seras and her company was by far the most precious to her.

 

Seras was away on another mission that could easily have been handled by their human troops, so Integra lit a cigar as she leaned back in her chair and glared unseeing through the windows of her office. She exhaled the heavy smoke and tapped ash off the end as she summoned her servant.

 

“You called, Master?” Alucard appeared from shadows and smoke, flamboyant as ever, voice pitched low to be smooth and compelling. She felt him arrive, but didn’t bother looking at him.

 

“Yes, I did.” She exhaled more smoke and switched her attention to the reflection in the windows. Red eyes were riveted to her, as expected, and the man hovering behind her wore a look of hopeful bloodthirstiness. “Something is wrong with Seras Victoria.”

 

Alucard sighed heavily, dropping gracelessly from his feet into the gothic throne that suddenly appeared behind him. Integra swiveled to face him and wondered if perhaps Seras got her taste in ornate furniture from her master, though she thankfully hadn’t picked up the rest of his melodramatics.

 

He slung one leg over the arm of his chair and propped his head up on a gloved hand. “There is indeed. At first I thought I just remembered her wrong or that she had changed over the decades, but now…”

 

Integra waited for him to continue, but he seemed perfectly content to leave her hanging. “Alucard,” she said warningly, glaring at him. He sighed again, slouching further, shadows swirling restlessly around his chair.

 

“Now… I’m thinking it must be a woman thing,” he mused.

 

Integra’s eye twitched and her hand ached for her pistol. “ _A woman thing_ ,” she repeated darkly.

 

“Yes, a woman thing. But if it was, I would expect you to know it, so I suppose it isn’t a woman thing,” he said blithely, but the mocking edge of his grin let her know he was goading her on purpose. His fingers drummed absently against the wooden arm of his chair. “Presumably you thought it was a vampire thing?”

 

She ground her teeth as she counted down from ten for patience. “Isn’t it?”

 

“No.” His eyes narrowed, staring hard at the middle distance. “And if it isn’t a woman thing or a vampire thing, then it must be a _Seras_ thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I did all kinds of research that didn't make it in here, but one that I want to share is Seras' training. When we meet Seras in the manga, she's part of an armed police unit. In the UK that means she had to already have trained to be a cop, done 2 years probation as a cop, and additional 2 years, and then almost 7 months of additional training in fire arms use and safety, scenario training, war games, etc. Fandom puts her at 19 (this isn't in the manga - maybe from character sheets or from the anime? I dunno) but the youngest she could be is 23/24, since she also had to go through initial 4 months police training and the earliest she could have started that is 18. Does it make a difference? Not really. But I did math and therefore you're going to hear about it. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Also, the first vampire paranormal romance novel was published in 1999, the year Hellsing is originally set in, and I have no clue whether or not you can overwork egg whites. Of all the things I did look up, that one didn't make the list.
> 
> I'm five pages into the next chapter but it's anyone's guess when I'll finish it - very busy semester ahead.


	2. Alucard

30 years ago

At first he thought he’d died and finally gone to hell. This strange void, an expanse crammed into nowhere, packed with screaming, tormented souls, where he was unarmed and powerless – it had to be hell.

 

 _That can’t be right_ , he thought hazily. _I didn’t get to see the sunrise before I died this time_.

 

He was shoved by the panicking souls as they tried to flee, but the churning stream of them were swept back towards him again and again. He snarled as they jostled him, pressed too close, their voices drowning him –

 

_Oh._

 

Whether or not this was hell, it was his own mind, the way it hadn’t been for over a hundred years, the way it was before Van Helsing cast his spells and carved his runes into his flesh.

 

Another hard shove and he snapped, grabbing the offender and ripping the punk’s head from his shoulders. Blood poured over his white shirt and gloveless hands as the other people scattered back like minnows retreating from a shark. They were hardly worth his notice except that they were getting on his goddamn nerves.

 

The blood stayed, but the body dissipated, nothing but smoke in the wind. The screaming horde stayed back as best it could, pulling back in jerks as they were tossed forward by the press of people. He started to remember what happened. He’d been at war, _finally_ , in the thick of it again, had released all the souls he’d eaten over the years to fight the Nazis and the Catholics and Walter… He’d inhaled the blood of the slain, cackling, and then the damn anomaly of physics had contaminated his river of blood. One body’s worth of bad blood and it polluted the entire city – his lip curled in a sneer. He’d find the little bastard, disembowel him, and make his way back to the fighting in London.

 

The masses cowered back as his red raptor’s gaze swept over them, looking for a blonde head with cat ears and a manic grin. When he focused on the people, bits of location seeped in at the edges, ruined stone walls that could have been Bran or Visegrád or London during the blitzkrieg, but when he tried to focus on it, the walls faded into nothingness. He turned back to scanning the crowd but found no sight of the catboy. He hissed in displeasure.

 

The fastest way to find a needle in a haystack was to burn the hay and sift through the ashes. Without his guns or his shadows, he couldn’t set the stack ablaze – he’d have to take it piece by piece. Trying to focus on the landscape made it retreat, so he couldn’t even look for a weapon among the rubble. Instead, he darted forward and grabbed a person at random, tearing into them with teeth and nails, ripping with bare hands. The echo of the taste of blood filled his mouth as he bit down sharply.

 

He killed again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and it wasn’t enough, it was like trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon, but he kept killing and killing and _killing_ …

 

He fell into the endless rhythm of it, mindless, almost senseless. Very, very slowly the din started to quiet, barely, but enough that he could feel (hear?) something else at the edge of his senses, like a rumble of thunder too far away to make out but that thrummed in his bones. He stopped, head tilting as he concentrated, but he couldn’t make the – sound? – skittering at the edge of his senses clear. Ligaments tore and the body separated from the flesh he still held in his jaws as he breathed hard and tried to focus.

 

“Silence!” he snarled. The quivering mass surrounding him fell quiet, hoping to escape his attention. It only lasted a minute or two, but just at the edge of his awareness he caught a familiar timbre and cheerful cadence.

 

An echo of memory nettled him, a sense of déjà vu – he’d just been here, lost in his mind, hearing – _Oh, huh. It’s you_.

 

He couldn’t make out words, but he could swear it was Seras’ voice.

 

Then the tide turned, the masses swept him up again, and he returned to the endless slaughter. There was no time then, only the ebb and flow of bodies. He listened hard when the carnage slowed – sometimes her voice was there, sometimes it wasn’t. As the tides came and went, it was easier to hear her, then easier still, as the ocean slowly drained away, drop by drop. He tried talking to her, but she didn’t seem to hear him. Eventually he gave up trying to reach her telepathically and just let her voice wash over him, a counterpoint to the screaming, pleading spirits trapped within him. She became like the moon to him, the presence of her voice coming and going, waxing and waning, a way to tell some semblance of time and a focal point, a lifeline to remind him that more existed beyond his mind and the mindless killing within it.

 

....

 

Literal decades of introspection – albeit to kill off pieces he’d absorbed rather than to reminisce – made Alucard less than inclined to keep his own company lately. He’d hoped to return to needling his master and fledgling and even looked forward to the rather more dubiously enjoyable company of the Hellsing troops. He might have a generally solitary nature, but being caged within his mind had made him crave companionship. Seras Victoria was making that _difficult_ as she kept disappearing on him. The one who had believed most fervently in his return, the most steadfast of his allies, was now the one most vexingly capricious. His tête-à-tête with Integra assured him this was a new development and one that she didn’t approve of, either.

 

The challenge of the Seras problem intrigued him. To be brutally honest, Alucard was a blunt force weapon – point and shoot, like a physical embodiment of a nuke – and he hadn’t needed to sneak or strategize since his failed incursion on the British Empire. This was the first time in a long time that he confronted an issue he couldn’t shoot his way out of and his usual interrogation technique – eating people and extracting the information from the memories carried within their blood – wasn’t suitable here.

 

This called for reconnaissance.

 

His first target was London. He hadn’t been there in thirty years and the last he saw it, it had been a burning, crumbling city flooded with blood. As much as he had enjoyed that chaos, others clearly hadn’t. Integra had told him about the rebuilding and the rehabilitation of London proper – the sprawling metropolis had always been active at the edges, but it had taken the better part of several years to restore the heart of the city to something fit for human habitation. Integra had been consulted repeatedly on the supernatural defensive measures now built into the city and had been one of the magicians who warded the rebuilt palace and parliament buildings. Seras, in the rare times that he caught her alone and in an amiable mood, told him about the way Integra had run herself ragged during the reconstruction and had mentioned the supernatural community that sprung up along the way. Westminster, Chelsea, and Kensington had been hardest hit by Millennium bombs and most difficult to reconstruct – the once opulent, gentrified areas had become a haven to the inhuman London residents. The highest concentration of them were in Chelsea, so he headed there first.

 

He had occasionally walked through London with the Police Girl before – a few times to train her to use her vampiric senses in the crowded urban environment and a handful more times on smaller missions. Those experiences, as much as the memories in her blood, had given him a handle on how the fledgling operated. Her tenacious _goodness_ was never more obvious than when they wandered the city. Keeping her focused on training or missions in London was, to mangle a phrase he’d heard from Quincy Morris, like herding a glaring of unusually helpful cats. He would take his eyes off her for a heartbeat and she’d be opening doors for people laden with packages and bags or helping the elderly cross the street or even rescuing cats from trees. Something about her – her face? her manner? maybe it was her eyes – drew the attention of every lost tourist, stray child and animal, and any other helpless soul within a mile radius, it seemed. She was such a goody-two-shoes that it almost disgusted him – it had definitely made him wonder if she’d ever become a full-fledged vampire.

 

Well, she was fully-fledged now, and she apparently hadn’t changed a bit. He stalked her through the streets of Chelsea, little more than a half-imagined shadow thanks to the powers of his new familiar, and watched as she got up to the same sort of mischief – or rather, anti-mischief – as before. Now the children tailing her and nipping at her heels were werewolf pups and the old woman whose groceries she carried up four flights of stairs to the woman’s apartment was a rusalka with more wrinkles than face, but Seras’ pathological helpfulness was in full swing, despite her red eyes and blood drinking. She even walked a lost goblin to the entrance to the Underground, warning him to stay off the tracks and watching him scamper through the hidden doorway before moving on with her self-appointed duties.

 

 _How_ , he wondered, _did I end up with such a salt of the earth bobby for a fledgling?_ He might have the armor, but Seras was more suited to be the shining knight. She made him feel almost unbearably old and jaded sometimes, mad old king and warlord that he was. Then again, she also made him feel unbearably alive. Very old and very alive, often simultaneously.

 

She stopped to have a cup of something hot – tea, probably – with a stout woman who seemed to be some sort of shifter. Their discussion was half briefing, half gossip and he listened in but heard nothing of particular interest.

 

Whatever had caused Seras’ unusual behavior at the manor, it wasn’t effecting her behavior here, as far as he could tell. Integra said none of her captains or troops had reported anything unusual about her actions or attitude during training or missions, either. His eyes narrowed as he considered that. He returned to his rooms, sprawled in his chair, and ruminated over what he knew – and more importantly, what he didn’t – over a glass of wine.

 

Even now, so many weeks after his return, her scent lingered in his room. She had admitted rather shyly that she would spend her days in his rooms sometimes, chattering at his coffin as if he were laying inside it. She had sat in his chair and soaking in the echoes of his presence. She had even dusted his coffin – and as much as he normally hated having anyone touch his coffin, the thought left him strangely unperturbed. She’d pulled his chair close to his coffin as if to get as close as possible to the very tangible reminder of his existence… and she’d left a book half read on his chair, which he should eventually give back, since she had been wandering around, peering at shelves and under cushions, muttering about it.

 

Stalking her through the streets of London had been less informative than he’d hoped. He glowered absently and drummed his fingers against his chair as he considered alternate sources of information. The easiest, without doubt, would be to read her mind, but it was closed to him by thirty years’ independence and blood drinking on her part and he seriously doubted she would grant him access to it were he to ask. Only slightly inferior would be drinking her blood, but conniving to get a taste without tipping his hand would be tricky and she’d likely shoot him the way Integra had if he simply walked up and tried to bite her. Was there an answer in the memories he'd taken from her blood the night he turned her?

 

He rifled through them, finding no obvious parallels, and then started from her earliest memory and worked his way forward. Alucard was briefly distracted by the memory of her parents’ death and her mother’s rape, a stray daydream of a young Seras rushing forward to stab his rapist making him huff with amusement. He ran through the other scraps she’d gotten into – bullies at school, a bar brawl when she’d been a teenager, the less-than-detached sparring matches in martial arts classes that were a hairs breadth from being an actual fight – she was by nature a fierce, hot tempered little thing, he thought with a grin. This skulking of hers was new, though – from what he could see in her memories, she was almost pathologically incapable of backing away from anything, so what on earth had her retreating now?

 

He had his hounds shadow her over the next few nights as he sifted through decades of paperwork, comparing the most recent field reports to older ones and finding no references to any unusual behavior on her part during missions – at least, none that the human troops had noticed. Yearly performance reviews revealed that she was well liked by her soldiers and that they hadn’t noticed any antisocial behavior on her part. He didn’t know if the upcoming reviews would be the same, but given the tenor of the field reports and training records, he doubted they would change. Seras had dutifully filed copies of her correspondence with other paranormal agencies and inhuman citizens. The detritus of diplomacy, he scoffed – he wouldn’t have bothered with written warnings to the Bureau of Nonhuman Governance that they were encroaching on Hellsing territory, he’d have killed them and shipped the bodies back to Washington and had done with it. Then again, he’d also never coordinated multinational fugitive hunts, which were rather hard to accomplish without allies. Tracking down suspected Millennium scientists and grunts had her reaching across species and nations alike, but from all accounts she’d eradicated the last of them within a decade. Vampire covens across the UK paid their respects to her during their regular reports, showing due deference to her status as one of his line but also to her strength and the many efforts she made on their behalf, keeping them safe from fanatic humans just as she kept humans safe from wasteful, gluttonous vampires. There were letters from covens further afield, too, though fewer of them. One particularly strange letter came from a fledgling in New Zealand, but it seemed nothing had come of his outlandish requests.

 

There was no cageyness present in any of these records, not even the emails she’d filed two nights ago. Whatever caused her behavior, it was clearly very specific to the manor. Several more fruitless nights were spent searching the house top to bottom, shadow by shadow, but without knowing what he was really looking for, there wasn’t much that could tell him if he’d stumbled across the problem. There was nothing glaringly obvious, at any rate – no skeletons hiding in the closet or secret lovers stashed in the rafters. She didn’t even keep a diary, a fact that he normally would have approved of but that currently irritated him. Circling around the edges and working his way to the center hadn’t revealed anything useful, so it was time to change tacks and focus on the source: Seras herself.

 

He just had to conspire to get her alone first.

 

....

 

After the Valentine Massacre

 

“Good morning Master! Um, evening, I mean,” Seras corrected at Alucard’s sardonic look. He turned back to looking at the moon, strolling along the wooded path. Seras skipped a little to keep up with his steps and endured the silence for as long as she could, which was not very long at all. “You know,” she said companionably, “calling you Master all the time makes me feel like Igor.” She contorted and made a silly face, speaking in a lisping rasp, “Good evening master.” She waggled her eyebrows and earned an amused snort from Alucard. “Brains for my master? No, blood for master! Yes, my master, I’ll go get the animated corpses now my master. Of course I cleared your dishes, master, and I oiled the hinges of the door to your laboratory while I was at it, ma- _aaa_ -aster,” she continued. She pulled her arms in close and made small clawing motions with her hands, growling and chuckling to herself. 

 

"Police Girl, what are you doing?” She snapped back to her normal upright posture at the censure in his tone.

 

“Being Igor, of course! You know, from _Frankenstein_?”

 

“I have read _Frankenstein_ , Police Girl, and there is no Igor in it.”

 

“Well, not in the book – Igor is from the movie – you know what? That’s beside the point, Master.” She managed a few more steps before she broke the silence again. “The book is much better than the movies, so I’d say you’re not missing out on much.”

 

“I wouldn’t have taken you for the sort to read _Frankenstein_ , Police Girl.”

 

“On my own I probably wouldn’t’ve, but we covered it in class and I took a shine to it.” She absently kicked a rock out of the way. “I always felt sorry for the creature, you know.”

 

“A monster created from carrion and hubris. A piecemeal horror whose strength and intellect was bent to destructive means but who could not face the consequences of his own cruelty,” Alucard said flatly. “And you pity it.”

 

“Well, yeah,” Seras said. “I mean, I didn’t go on homicidal rampages, but I know what it’s like to feel abandoned and rejected and misunderstood. Don’t most people? Besides, all he really wanted was to feel like he belonged, to have friends and family who loved him.”

 

“He wanted to disembowel the man who created him,” Alucard reminded her.

 

“Only after Frankenstein kicked him out!” Seras defended. She absently kicked at a rock. “Why are you so dead-set against him, anyway?”

 

“I wasn’t the first time I read it,” he replied. His voice took on the vague aspect of someone rifling through their memories. “Not the first few dozen or so, really. It was one of the books I used to teach myself English, you know. I originally admired his perseverance and twisted sense of justice.” Absently, he rubbed at the runes decorating the back of his gloves. “Later, I saw what a pathetic wretch he was. A misformed creature made by an arrogant madman.” He saw the moment recognition dawned, connecting his scientific enhancements and magical servitude to the creature of the novel.

 

“You see yourself in Frankenstein’s monster, huh? Well…” her voice trailed off and when she started again it had the sing-song cadence of a recitation. “His hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips,” Seras quoted. “You’re right, that does rather suit you, master, except for the watery and shrivelly bits.” She withered slightly under his stern expression, but just as her grin fell away he harrumphed and it sprang back into place at his surly grunt, realizing he wasn’t actually offended. “And really, I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Master! I mean, sure you like killing people and maiming them and such, but you saved me! And you’ve got a kind heart, I’ve seen it.” She stopped walking when he started laughing hysterically. “I mean it! I’ve seen you be nice before! Like there was the time… uh, or wait – once you…” She stopped and thought hard. He was still wheezing with laughter. “Well, you’re not as mean as you make yourself out to be,” she snapped. “I’ve seen you help Walter without being asked, and you’ve brought Sir her tea when she forgot and Walter was busy, and I saw you light one of the captains’ cigarettes for him last mission. And!” She brightened visibly. “And you told me it was alright to learn to be a vampire at my own pace, and you don’t kill innocents, and you kill ghouls quickly so they don’t suffer, and –” She was on a roll now, which disturbed him. Had he really been nice so frequently?

 

“Police Girl,” he said sharply. She snapped to attention and, thankfully, shut up. “Shouldn’t you be working with the mercenaries?”

 

She wilted slightly. “Well, yeah… But the captain is so rude! And I feel like a fraud, trying to teach them when I barely know what I’m doing.”

 

“How many missions have you been on now, Police Girl? And none of them have ever even seen a ghoul. Now beat it,” he ordered, waving her away with a shooing motion while turning back to his path through the woods.

 

He didn’t need to look at her to see her roll her eyes and drag her feet as she left, muttering, “Yes, Master.” He shook his head as he continued on his stroll, vaguely wondering what had prompted her to follow him into the woods to begin with.

 

....

 

 _It used to be so easy_ , he thought ruefully. She used to follow him around like a smitten puppy; he’d commanded her undivided attention by his mere presence. He’d been her sire and her mentor and she’d become something almost like a friend to him, a dependable source of entertainment and affection. Now, there seemed to be a million things clamoring for her attention and he was lost in the crowd of them – far cry from when he had been lost in the crowd of his mind and she had been his cynosure, he realized sourly. He was no longer the only vampire she knew; he was neither her teacher nor her sole source of information on the paranormal now. The troops were firmly under her command, not his, and she rarely needed back up on missions, so he wasn’t sent along with her and he wasn’t needed to help her train them or keep them in line. She made her reports directly to Integra, rather than to him or Walter as she had in the past. He didn’t even need to remind her to drink her blood or sleep in her coffin, so he didn’t have an excuse to talk to her regularly anymore.

 

 _Ambush it is_ , he decided with relish.

 

He made sure to be conveniently away for several nights dealing with rumors of a demonic infestation in Leeds – rumors he’d concocted himself since there was no point in leaving such things to chance – and waited impatiently for Tuesday evening. A quick peek through a shadow portal and his quarry was in sight and in position. He teleported.

 

Seras would have jackknifed all the way off the couch, but Integra’s fingers threaded through her short hair restricted the instinctive movement. Integra pushed Seras’ head back into her lap, saying blandly, “It’s just him, Seras.” She remained tense despite Integra’s serenity, neck craning to keep him in view as he moved to lean against the far arm of the couch. Integra kept her eye firmly on the television, but he could tell she was barely restraining herself from rolling it at Seras’ actions.

 

“Not this show again,” he complained, seeing the familiar faces from that baking show they seemed addicted to. “What could possibly be so fascinating about this show to you? Integra, you have cooks who could make you any of these dishes whenever you want, but you don’t eat them, you just watch people make them – and Seras, you can’t even eat these things, why bother?”

 

Integra’s fingers carded through Seras’ hair in a lazy way that spoke of an old habit rather than a conscious decision. “It’s relaxing,” she said. “Besides, Seras fancies the pants off Sue Perkins.” The police girl squeaked, face flushing as red as her eyes as her hand covered as much of her face as it could and her shadows curled close around her, losing the arm shape she’d had it in.

 

“Integra!” she hissed fiercely, “You can’t just say things like that!” Integra glanced down at the vampire in her lap and smirked.

 

“Why not? We both know it’s true,” she teased. Then she turned her gaze to Alucard and wickedness gleamed in her eye. “Do you know, we met her once at a fancy charity fundraiser –” Seras squealed, shadows flailing, making a sharp throat cutting gesture while glaring up at Integra.

 

“You were sworn to secrecy!” she cried. “You promised!”

 

“Yes, well, as embarrassing as it was for you, I found it highly entertaining, and I’m sure Alucard would as –”

 

“Integra, I will tell him about Aberystwyth,” Seras interjected, and suddenly Integra found the program absolutely fascinating, steadily ignoring both of her vampires.

 

Alucard glowered at the dark haired woman in a suit on the screen. It was one thing to share Seras’ attention with Integra – seeing them together, hearing them together was like returning to a warm hearth after a long, cold day – but this interloper grated on his nerves. “What’s so special about her, anyway?” he asked brusquely. “She seems plain enough to me –”

 

“Blasphemy!” Seras gasped. “She’s handsome and clever and _witty_ and those suits – and sometimes she wears a tie and sometimes she takes _off_ her tie, and her voice is just – just – everything, ok? Everything! She’s the total package!”

 

“And she likes Seras’ –”

 

“Integra, I will shave your head while you sleep if you finish that sentence,” Seras barked. Integra just smirked and mouthed _knickers_ at Alucard over Seras’ head while tugging playfully at Seras’ bangs and conveniently obstructing her view.

 

Alucard’s eyes narrowed and his gaze flitted between Seras and the television. Bad enough that the interloper had her attention, her admiration and distant affection, even, when she was just a figure on the screen, but if she had taken _liberties_ … if his Police Girl had _enjoyed_ those liberties… Integra was one thing, he could stand her affection for Integra, but for this stranger, this _woman_ –

 

He stopped, brought up short by the thought.

 

Was it just that Seras didn’t like having a male around? She seemed to like the male troops well enough, but Alucard was currently the only man in residence at the manor and she and Integra had both grown used to having the house to themselves, a woman-only domain that men passed through but didn't linger or reside in.

 

“I’m handsome and clever,” he mused, drawing the attention of both women as he started shifting his features. “I happen to think I’m witty, too, and I’m almost always in a suit.” His voice remained husky, but rose a couple octaves. Lean curves appeared and his hair curled and waved, growing just longer than the police girl’s hair, a dark cloud around a sharp, shrewd face. “I could even switch to a tie, I suppose,” he drawled, tugging absently at the cravat at his throat, dragging it free and down his newly enhanced bosom. Full red lips curled in a wicked smirk as he glanced at Seras from under lowered lashes, meeting her wide eyes with a coy carnelian gaze.

 

“What do you think, Seras? Is this more to your liking?” She was frozen, staring at him, blushing prettily. He leaned over, planting a hand next to her hip, pinning her between his body and Integra’s. “Or is this blasphemy too?” He smirked and let the top button of his shirt slip loose, watching her gaze dart down automatically at the motion before she jerked her attention back to his face. Integra’s fingers were still tangled in her hair, but she had stilled at his display, too. “Well?” he asked, lowering himself closer to the younger vampire. The hand not supporting his weight came up to brush under her chin, still holding the cravat. Her breath sucked in so fast it whistled faintly.

 

“Yes,” she said feebly.

 

“Yes, it’s better, or yes, it’s blasphemy?” He was aware he was enjoying this far more than he should, but he couldn’t help toying with her – he had thirty years to make up for, after all – and he ducked his head so close to hers that he could feel her breath on his face –

 

Her shadows swallowed her, whisking her elsewhere. _She’s not allowed to teleport away from me_ , he thought indignantly. _Not when I’m the one who taught her that!_ He conveniently ignored that he did not, in fact, teach her teleportation, not really. He stared in consternation down at Integra’s lap, brows furrowed.

 

“You pushed too hard,” she said, and edge of amusement and mockery in her voice. He harrumphed and pushed himself back to sprawl on the couch beside her.

 

“Well, you don’t seem to be getting anywhere,” he snapped. “It was worth a try.”

 

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Integra continued watching her program while Alucard fumed, concocting and rejecting a dozen schemes to wring answers out of the police girl, ignoring the show except to sneer at the object of Seras’ crush when she appeared onscreen.

 

“Well, what do _you_ think?” he asked finally. He meant what she thought about the situation with Seras and she knew it, but when Integra turned her attention to him there was a devilish gleam in her eye that reminded him entirely too much of himself at his most contrary.

 

“I think with your hat and your coat, you’ll be the spitting image of Carmen Sandiego.”

 

He snarled at her and teleported to his room, leaving her alone on the couch and hearing her laughter echoing through her manor.

 

....

 

The night before the flight to Brazil

 

“It’s old fashioned, but I have an idea,” he’d told Walter, and while Walter had approved of his idea in general, he hadn’t approved of his methods. _Stodgy old codger_ , he thought affectionately. Walter was far too soft in his handling of the police girl in Alucard’s eyes. Instead, he’d had to team up with the mercenaries and their captain.

 

Bernadotte was a practical man. He’d ordered the captain and his men to be ready and waiting with a coffin, nails, and a hammer, and by the time he was ready, they were sitting next to a coffin, hammers in hand and nails at the ready. He swept an approving gaze over the scene before he disappeared through the shadows to take his customary seat in his room. Stretching out his long legs, he set his hat on the table and summoned his fledgling.

 

She stood at attention before him, nervous but curious, as he regarded her for long minutes. He said nothing, wondering if she would break and ask what he wanted or if she would wrangle control over her impulsive nattering and wait.

 

She waited. She fidgeted and her eyes darted and several times she inhaled deeply as if preparing to speak before sighing heavily and remaining quiet. For all her innate persistence, she had no innate patience and it was clear how difficult it was for her to wait.

 

At last he broke the silence, deciding he had had her on tenterhooks long enough. “So.” She jumped, bristling visibly, and her gaze jerked back to meet his. A grin tugged at his lips at her reaction. “You’ve done well on our missions lately, Police Girl. Well enough that I think it’s time to teach you something new.” She had snapped up into parade rest and she was practically vibrating with excitement. He rarely complimented her – he rarely complimented anyone, for that matter – and with the exception of a few dismal attempts at sparring and the night he taught her about using her third eye, he mostly left her to discover her new powers on her own, simply watching and making mocking comments as she stumbled through the transition from human to Midian. She knew this lesson was a rare opportunity.

 

He propped his chin on one hand and tapped his finger against his cheek as if in serious contemplation. “There are many, many things I could teach you. Shape-shifting, controlling the weather, hypnotism, creating familiars, phasing, summoning low creatures, manipulating shadows… So many things you don’t know. So _very_ many things.”

 

There’s very little he remembers of his human life, but a vignette surfaces in Seras’ presence now – Mircea teaching Radu how to fish in the Târnava Mare, a line cradled in his palms and spooled in his lap, whispering, “Gently, Radu, gently – the fish must not know the line is there until you have set the hook. Be like the spider, tugging gently at its web… It is crafty, the spider, and will not strike until the fly is snared.” He had forgotten that moment until just now, in Seras' presence - the sun through the leaves, the cool water lapping at the river banks, his brothers’ voices – he would bet that he hadn’t remembered that as an adult human, much less as an ancient vampire. Nevertheless, his brother’s advice is sound and he tugged ever so gently at the compulsion, gauging Seras’ reaction with sly patience.

 

His fledgling hung on his every word, rapt, holding her breath out of excitement and not even realizing she wasn’t breathing. He fought hard against a manic grin and allowed only a subtle smirk to twist his lips. He tilted his head, lowered his eyelids, peered up from beneath his lashes at her – a coy and cunning look. Her gaze was fastened to his and her cheeks, normally so pallid from her refusal to drink, pinkened slightly. Deliberately he drew out the moment, partially to keep her enthralled, partially for his own amusement. “Or perhaps… teleportation. Using shadows to create corridors through space, manipulating the fabric of reality itself – yes, that would do nicely. I think you might be able to handle that.” There was the hook set, as his Police Girl swaying slightly forward in her eager anticipation.

 

He walked her through calling the shadows – a feat she had managed subconsciously when fighting FREAKs – and pooling them, making three dimensions from the flat shadows, and connecting this place and that place with a skein of shadows and power. He was pleasantly surprised that she managed a weak portal, albeit one too shallow to travel through, even in her weak fledgling state. He pushed at her power with his own, making it wispy and scattered even as it fought him to form something more substantial, to increase her frustration, but praised her efforts genuinely if sarcastically. Finally, he reeled her in.

 

“You’re close, Police Girl, but just not there yet,” he said, disappointment underlying his tone.

 

She looked desolate at his apparent decision to give up the lesson. “Please, I can do it! I know I can!” Blue eyes wide, hands clasped before her, she pleaded prettily as he pretended to consider. “I’m so close, Master,” she pressed, “I can almost feel it, I just – I just haven’t got the knack for it yet, but I’m getting there!”

 

“ _Almost_ feel it,” he muttered, as though to himself, and turned his face away to hide the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes at the trap well laid and sprung. “Perhaps you just need to experience it yourself. Look,” he commanded, summoning shadows and stepping forward, stopping halfway through the shadows and turning back to her. “Well? Come on, Police Girl,” he said impatiently. She squeaked and jumped forward but paused at the edge of the portal, uncertain. A booted foot snuck forward to sink into the shadows, but feeling the ground drop out from beneath her within the intangible in between, it recoiled and she hopped back a little. He rolled his eyes and stepped the rest of the way through. “Don’t be a coward,” he snapped, and thrust a hand back through the portal, palm up and beckoning, “Step through.” She grabbed his hand, closed her eyes tight, and followed when he pulled her through. As soon as she stepped into the new space, he stepped out, letting her go, and gestured for the mercenaries to nail up the coffin. It took her a moment to get reoriented, going from vertical to horizontal and incorporeal to solid, but once she did, she started screeching and thrashing, making the coffin rock and his ears ring.

 

Bernadotte and his men looked uneasy, but Alucard motioned for them to continue working and seated himself comfortably on the coffin, stretching his legs out in front of him. Bernadotte shook his head, tugging at his braid. “Doesn’t feel right, Mr. Alucard,” he muttered. “I don’t like tricking her zees way – ’ow can you?”

 

“She will learn in time that a coffin is the truest safety,” he said dismissively. “If she had taken blood already, she’d be strong enough to go without it, but she’s _stubborn_ , so we must improvise.”

 

He turned to face his master, trying to tune out the Police Girl’s fussing. She stopped whining briefly when he commanded her to be silent so he could talk to Integra, but started up again when the mercenaries roughly hauled her coffin into a van to get to the airport. He almost felt a twinge of something that might have been a conscience when he hear her whimper, “Master, you traitor…” but it twisted into amusement when she followed with, “shoulda known not to trust the bloody arsehole…”

 

....

 

He kept his woman-shape for several more days out of a mix of sheer contrariness and a vicious delight at the sight of Seras’ beet-red blush whenever she caught sight of him. Integra didn’t seem to mind which form he took and the Hellsing troops gave him wide berth regardless, so there was no reason not to keep it – but he eventually grew bored with it and reverted to his usual form.

 

Skulking around London yielded no more answers than it had the first time; Seras, wielding her shadows as skillfully as a matador with a cape, proved impossible to pin down; her human soldiers knew nothing – he’d run through all available field reports and begun scanning their minds to no avail. He’d even asked Pip, though that proved equally fruitless.

 

“’ow should I know, Mr. Alucard?” The familiar was sulking from his summons – a hard wallop on a structural beam in the basement that made the ex-mercenary whine and rub at his barely-substantial shoulder – but honest. At least, Alucard assumed he was being honest, since he wasn’t displaying any of the tells that gave away when he cheated at card games, and those were the same now as they had been before he died, though he was admittedly better at not getting caught with the powers he now possessed.

 

“You’re her familiar,” he said. “Your soul is tied to her very whim. You ought to know what’s going on, since you’re a projection of her mind –”

 

Pip waved a hand dismissively. “Spare me the mumbo-jumbo, _s’il vous plaît_. Fact iz, I dunno anything more about it zen you do. Actually,” he said thoughtfully, “I might know less. I haven’ seen her act weird. None of ze Hellzing men ’ave, either. Ze only ones zat ’ave are you and Sir Integra.” With that, he faded back into the walls.

 

Now he ruminated on the familiar’s words while prowling through the remains of Hyde Park, which had become an overgrown plot of cluttered trees and thickets used primarily by city-dwelling shifters. He followed walking paths that no longer existed by force of habit, phasing through trees and gliding over jutting pieces of broken concrete. Even the bright waxing crescent moon couldn’t draw his attention. He was too busy mulling over the problem like a man incessantly running his tongue against a sore tooth.

 

As far as he could tell, there were only three people aware that Seras’ behavior had changed – Integra, himself, and Seras. He and Integra couldn’t pin down why with the information they had available and neither found the situation tenable. Seras, in the rare moments either of them caught her away from the other, seemed somewhat restless but generally acted as normally, amenable and affectionate to Integra, saucy and cheerful with him. The problem was something about when all three of them were together, but neither he nor Integra could pinpoint just _what_ about the combination made Seras react poorly.

 

There was patience and then there was hesitancy; he felt he’d exhausted the first and was sliding into the second. _Decisive action is required_ , he thought. He doubted asking Seras would get anywhere since she dodged Integra’s subtle inquiries and fled at the first sign of any probing on his part. Time for the second-best option – drinking her blood. The memory of her taste lingered, even after all these years. Acerbically, with mock piety, he contemplated the _hardship_ and _suffering_ he would endure over the course of gathering information from her blood and preparing arguments to convince Integra that it was the best plan.

 

As it turned out, convincing Integra wasn’t an obstacle at all.

 

He had read, with equal parts malice and pleasure, the reports on how she had slaughtered Zorin Blitz and the werewolf captain – there was even some video of her and Zorin, courtesy of a heavily abused but miraculously intact surveillance camera at Hellsing. He had seen her training her troops, using her shadows, speed, and strength to whip them into fighting shape. Integra arranged for them to work together on a mission so he had the opportunity to see first-hand how well his former fledgling fought; he said it was for reconnaissance; Integra rightfully guessed that he had just wanted to see Seras in action for his own amusement.

 

“I don’t see why we both need to go,” Seras had grumbled.

 

“Because you haven’t dealt with rogue shapeshifters as much as he has, and he can’t swim,” Integra had retorted, jabbing a thumb in his direction. “It’s catch and release and I want both of you intact and back here once the kelpie is contained, the relocation specialists will handle it from there.” She’d handed Seras a golden bridle and shooed them out the door.

 

Seras returned soaking wet and smelling like marsh water, squelching as she stomped down to her rooms. Alucard had been completely dry, albeit with muddy boots, and he’d smirked when he returned the bridle to Integra, thanking her profusely for sending them on “an enlightening and entertaining” mission. Integra fixed Seras a cup of hot chocolate laced with her own blood when she went to get Seras’ statement for the mission report and fixed him with a glare that would have killed a lesser monster on the spot. Alucard just grinned and continued his siege, needling his Master and former fledgling both as he waited for Seras’ temper to reach the breaking point. After all, it wouldn’t be _fair_ to leave Integra out of the fun, he explained to her several nights later. Integra’s answering snarl would have put a rabid werewolf to shame.

 

Annoying the women actually alleviated the issue of Seras’ behavior – for Integra, at least. Seras took to avoiding him by spending more and more time with Integra, who could order him away. That didn’t help _him_ , though, so he continued pushing Seras to the limit until she was spoiling for a fight.

 

She finally snapped and took a swing at him when he’d insulted her troops during a particularly grueling training session. A few members of the London coven stalked Hellsing troops, armed with paint guns, through an arduous obstacle course-cum-arena set up in a cordoned-off chunk of Thetford Forest. They’d all been camping out – well, the humans had, the vampires had coffins set up in a mine in Grimes Graves – and it had, of course, been chucking down rain the whole time. Seras was running herself ragged keeping her troops in formation while also keeping tabs on the vampires who volunteered for the hunting exercise and making sure supplies for both parties, especially blood for the vampires and adequate first aid for the humans, were at hand. Added to that, she’d had to run off several adventurous tourists who’d ignored the cordons roping off the area and she’d had one of her experienced captains airlifted back to headquarters after sliding into a gully and breaking his ankle. The less experienced captain leaned far too heavily on Seras for guidance, in his estimation, and he hadn’t bothered to be polite when he told her so on the third day of the venture. That was when she’d swung around, punching him hard with her flesh arm in the sternum and following the motion to pin him against a tree that shook precariously at the impact.

 

“What? What do you want, huh?” Seras snarled, red eyes glowing and shadows snapping. Her troops, ashen and wide-eyed, backed up at the sudden violence from their usually kind and patient commander. “You have been _riding my arse_ for weeks now – you’re sure as fuck not helping with any of this and all you have is your smug little jibes – you – you _bloody arsehole_ , what the fuck do you want from me, huh? Just tell me so I can get it over with and get back to my job! My _job_ , which I’ve been doing for thirty goddamn years without you, perfectly well I might add, but you! You have to step in and muck it up and you just can’t stop _picking_ –” His manic grin cut her diatribe short, leaving her gaping and wordless for a moment.

 

Distantly, he realized one of the London vampires – the old woman, Aethelthryth? Aelfgytha? something Saxon – was herding the Hellsing troops away to safety even as she hissed at the other vampires to leave them be. One of her coven members was too slow for her and she cuffed him about the ear, sending him skittering away.

 

“Why are you smiling? What the fuck is wrong with you, you crazy bastard?” Seras shook him roughly and he started to chuckle. Her lip curled and her jaw clenched and she punched him again. The tree behind him cracked, as did several of his ribs, which just made him laugh harder.

 

“Temper, temper, Seras Victoria,” he cooed. “Where’s the levelheaded commander now, hm?” An inhuman sound tore from her and her fist flashed forward again, but he’d disappeared. She struck the tree and felled it even as she turned, searching for him in the woods, knowing he wouldn’t go far. He reappeared at her shoulder, grabbing her hand and tsking at the shards of wood embedded in her flesh. “Clumsy,” he said mockingly, bringing her balled fist to his mouth and licking the blood from her knuckles. She gaped at his mouth for a fraught second, a frisson racing between them, before her gaze lifted to his and she caught the malicious glee in his expression.

 

He danced backwards from her fury, licking specks of blood – her blood – from his white glove, fangs shining in a patch of moonlight that pierced the forest canopy. 

 

" _You goddamn son of a_ –” teeth bared, brows drawn, she lunged for his throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, Sue Perkins was an utter gentlewoman. Seras had an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction and Sue Perkins gallantly offered her jacket to help Seras cover up. Integra, troll that she is, is purposely making it sound way more provocative than it really was, both to toy with Alucard, who has no idea what happened, and to wind up Seras, who is still mortified by the whole thing.
> 
> Also, I know how I want the beginning and the end of the last chapter to go, but it'll take me a while to figure out the middle, so please be patient with me.


	3. Seras

There were times when she just hated him, hated him so much that it burned her to the marrow. Throwing her weight to one side to flip around, one foot dragging along the forest floor to slow her down, whirling in an attempt to locate the teleporting bastard, she knew that she hated him then.

 

Shadows poured from her shoulder, spilling across the ground to pool between trees and climb them like vines. Crouched, ready, seething, she waited. He could pop in and out of existence at will, but to reach her he’d have to return. Her third eye and her shadows alerted her at the same time and she spun, fist flying, to catch him in the gut as he reappeared. She knocked him back; he crashed into a tree that shuddered from the force of the impact and stayed there, shoulders slumped.

 

She’d heard ribs crack and his head hung low, but she didn’t drop her guard. She’d seen him fight too often to fall for that trick.

 

“Very _good_ , Seras,” he purred, and then a many-eyed hound leapt at her. She kept her gaze on his as one of her shadows reared up, grabbed the familiar by the throat, and pinned it to another tree. As quickly as it arrived, the hound disappeared again.

 

“Isn’t this fun, Seras?” He paced towards her – stalking, really, except that she wasn’t prey. She allowed him to cross the eddying shadows.

 

It wasn’t fun. It _wasn’t_. She might be riding an adrenaline high, but that was all.

 

 _You don’t get adrenaline rushes anymore, Seras, you’re a freaking vampire, remember?_ She shoved that thought back. Acknowledging the anticipation and excitement singing in her blood meant acknowledging that it came from her and wasn’t something she could blame on Alucard and she just couldn’t deal with that. She’d been putting off dealing with that for a long time now and had no desire to handle that particular thorny issue any time soon, thanks.

 

“I barely remember the last time I fought an opponent of your caliber,” Alucard said musingly, and she knew he meant it as a compliment. She straightened and started pulling her temper back in check.

 

“We’re supposed to be training the soldiers,” she said as icily as she could manage, “not sparring or –”

 

“Or throwing temper tantrums?” he finished. The silky tone and sly look were calculated to get under her skin and they both knew it, but damn him, it was working. Her temper bucked at the reins and the red haze that she’d only just held off earlier threatened again. Her fist clenched at her side, her shadows coiled so tightly around trees that the wood creaked, and she took a long, slow breath as she stared at him and tried to stop clenching her teeth.

 

He appeared a hair’s breadth from her, looming with all his considerable presence. Her back stiffened in indignant fury. Even before he’d disappeared all those years ago, she would have stubbornly stayed put – now, with decades of experience and power of her own, she would sooner drink silver-laced holy water than give him the satisfaction of backing up. 

 

“You could always surrender,” he suggested with a toothy grin that said he knew she wouldn’t. She glared before sweeping his feet out from under him with a shadow. He’d disappeared again before he even hit the ground.

 

28 years ago

 

The work was mind numbing.

 

As excited as she’d been to play with the new camera, the novelty had worn off quickly. She wasn’t particularly interested in photography, nor was she a technophile, so the professional grade digital SLR quickly became just another tool to complete a particularly uninteresting task.

 

She flipped a page and clicked the button, moving faster than any human could and faster than she could even read the pages as she digitized them. Flip, click, flash. Flip, click, flash. Flip, click, flash, _ad nauseum_. Seras almost wished Integra had decided to have her type out the whole of the library instead, since then she’d at least absorb what she archived, but the director had decided that there were far too many sigils, pictures, diagrams, and charts that needed to be faithfully preserved so they might as well store the whole lot as pictures.

 

The monotony made Seras’ eyes cross with annoyance. The workers in London didn’t need help hauling away rubble and debris anymore, not that Integra could spare Seras for such menial labor now anyway. She missed the almost-burn of undead muscles as she strained to lift whole buildings, missed spending her nights with the sky above and the wind on her face as she tracked down stray ghouls and helped the returning civilians settle into the restored neighborhoods. She especially missed rescuing – okay, looting, if you wanted to be technical about it – artefacts from Old London. Nothing overly valuable, of course, but so much had been ruined by the rivers of blood and just tossed out that she’d balked at the wastefulness of it. Her shadows could pull the old, dried blood out of the fibers and restore things so she might as well salvage them, right? Right. It was how she got hold of the fine wool sweater she wore while digitizing the books – how she got most of her current wardrobe and furnishings, in fact.

 

The glamorous job of digitizing Hellsing’s library of occult books, journals, files, and random but important scribblings on the backs of envelopes fell to Seras for two reasons: she was the only one besides Integra with the clearance to access all of the documents and she could work faster, longer, and more accurately than any human archivist. The drooping vampire, working steadily, was on target to complete the whole project in less than a fortnight when a human, working steadily, would have taken months or even years.

 

Even after she finished photographing them, she’d still have to organize the whole lot. Seras groaned.

 

Pip leaned out of a convenient support pillar, taking in the tripod, the lighting, the book on a pedestal, and the dispirited vampire melting into the rolling chair as her shadows kept working. Flip, click, flash. Nothing particularly seemed out of place, but… “Iz everything okay, Mignonette?”

 

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Seras sighed. “How’s everything going upstairs?”

 

Pip grimaced, wrinkling his nose so much that his eyepatch shifted. “Zhat jackass working for the Cabinet is still ‘ere.”

 

Seras’ brows drew together as she glanced at the clock on the wall. “He was only scheduled for an hour.”  Pip just shrugged and puffed on his cigarette. “Stop smoking around the books,” she chided absently. Pip snorted.

 

“Not like it’s real smoke, mon cher,” he pointed out.

 

“If that smoke damages the very fragile, very antique, very precious books Integra has me working with, she will find a way to kill you again,” she said. “You know she’s inventive enough to do it.” She wasn’t paying much attention to Pip, though, instead considering the supremely irritating and pompous man who was supposed to leave two hours ago. She had started restricting the meetings on Integra’s schedule, shortening them a little at a time so that the overworked director went from working all hours to having no meetings after 8 pm. She’d already accepted that she could never get Integra working a simple 9 to 5 shift due to the very nature of their work, but the incredibly long hours after the attack on London had taken its toll on Integra and Seras was determined not to let Integra work herself to an early grave.

 

Mr. Pennicks worked for the Cabinet Office. He liked to pretend he worked in something as important as the JIC, but Seras had checked; he was a mid-level bureaucrat at best. He’d originally been investigating Hellsing’s use of government funds and services leading up to the Battle of London; that work should have been finished months ago, but the blasted man kept finding things to nitpick about in their current proceedings and therefore kept returning. Seras wistfully considered a restraining order but decided if she filed one, he’d likely accuse her of wasting government resources… and then use it as an excuse to make another meeting about Hellsing’s supposed misappropriation of goods and services.

 

“Pip, have Ms. Anvers put the kettle on and tell her to bring tea to the library in ten minutes. I’m going to get rid of the pillock.” He made a lazy salute and disappeared again.

 

Seras made a quick stop to pick up a brown paper wrapped package from her rooms and left it on the table next to Integra’s favorite chair in the library before heading to the office. The mansion was bare-boned compared to what it once was, but at least they’d managed to move operations back inside and get rid of the portable office they’d languished in for almost two years. Integra’s rebuilt office might be a bare shadow of its former glory, but at least she wasn’t freezing in the winter and roasting in the summer anymore, Seras mused.

 

She stopped before the closed office doors, hearing Pennicks droning on inside, and squared her shoulders. She put on a suitably grave face before she burst into the room as if from a run, hanging on to the doorknob with her solid hand.

 

“Sir, I hate to interrupt your evening, but Lieutenant Taylor is in the library, it’s an emergency,” she said in one rushed breath. Then she pretended to notice the shocked man, frozen mid-gesture, standing in front of Integra’s desk. “Pennicks, what are you doing here? Your appointment ended hours ago.”

 

Integra watched the proceedings with a raised eyebrow, knowing good and well that Seras was up to something but willing to let her take the lead. Pennicks, on the other hand, flushed a dreadfully unbecoming shade of puce before he started to bluster. “I – you – that is – young lady, I’m here on urgent business, we still have –”

 

Seras frowned and tilted her head, letting go of the door to tap her finger against her lips thoughtfully. “If it was so urgent,” she said curiously, “shouldn’t you have addressed it first, when your meeting started,” – she glanced at the clock – “three and a half hours ago?” Integra turned from Seras’ purposely innocent expression and coughed, shoulders shaking slightly.

 

“Well, I –” he began.

 

“And anyway, unless it’s as urgent as the unholy plague that the lieutenant has news about, I think you need to table that discussion. Also, Integra, Taylor brought samples, do you still have your hazmat gear?”

 

That finally did the trick. Paling, Pennicks grabbed his briefcase and hat and rushed out of Integra’s office, muttering about showing himself out. Seras let the door shut behind him and managed to hold back a snicker until she faced Integra. The almost constipated look on her favorite human’s face as she tried not to smile did her in; as soon as she succumbed, Integra broke, too.

 

“Hazmat suit?” she said when she finally had herself under control again. “Really, Seras? I thought you were laying it on thick before, but _that_ –” Integra broke off, shaking her head and grinning.

 

“He wasn’t leaving,” Seras said defensively. “I had to do something. Anyway, come on, I’ve arranged tea for you in the library.” She ushered the still amused woman down the hall, noticing the way the stiffness had leeched out of Integra’s shoulders and that she wasn’t grinding her teeth anymore. _Good_. _Now let’s get some food in you and maybe even get you to sleep before 1 tonight._

 

The tea tray sat on the table next to Integra’s chair, the package propped up against the table lamp. “What’s this?” Integra asked, reaching for it.

 

“Maybe you should have your tea first,” Seras began, but the ripping of paper made her sigh and roll her eyes.

 

“Oh, is this – Seras, did you get this? For me?” Integra turned, beaming at her vampire. Seras fought valiantly but vainly against the blush creeping up her neck to pinken her ears and cheeks.

 

“I thought, well, I got it for your birthday, really, but I thought after dealing with that sanctimonious prick for hours, maybe you’d like it now. It’s not a big thing, I got it second-hand…”

 

“Seras, this is a first edition!” Integra was hugging the book to her bosom, clearly delighted.

 

“Well, it’s second-hand from a vampire, so I knew it was old,” Seras admitted. It was a copy of _Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems_ that she’d bartered for in exchange for helping a sweet but befuddled vampire book collector set up his computer. She’d hoped Integra would like it – had noted the forlorn expression on Integra’s face when she’d discovered that so much of her personal library in her office had been ruined in the attack on headquarters, shelves upon shelves of old fiction and poetry lost. The important books and papers, the one Seras was digitizing, had been kept in a special vault, air tight and fireproof, but Integra’s personal books hadn’t been protected. She didn’t know if Integra had had a copy of that specific book, but it would have fit right in with the others she saw as they were ruefully discarded, so she’d decided to chance it.

 

Integra reached out, tugged her close, and gave her a one-armed embrace that lasted less than a breath but that made Seras forget to breathe.

 

“Two of my favorite poems are in here, you know. _The Nightingale_ and _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_. Have you read them?”

 

“No,” Seras said, “I never read very much poetry except what we had to read for class. I know of the second one, though – water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink, right?”

 

“Nor any drop to drink,” Integra corrected absently. “You really didn’t read it in school? I thought that was something people read in school. I mean, I read it on my own, but my tutors discussed it with me when we worked on literature and language proficiency.”

 

Seras had a sudden image of a young Integra, alone save for a tutor, in a full sized classroom, rows of empty desks surrounding her. She knew Integra had likely taken her lessons at the manor, but the piercing loneliness of the image struck a chord in her. “No, I didn’t.”

 

“It’s a classic! Here, sit down, I’ll read it to you, it’s really meant to be read aloud –”

 

“I’ll read it, you sit and have your tea,” Seras said, pushing Integra gently into her chair before pulling over an ottoman to perch on and flipping to the poem. She didn’t start reading until Integra took a sip of tea, speaking as smoothly as she could while settling into the rhythm of the poem. After that it just flowed out.

 

Integra listened in peaceable lassitude, good eye drifting closed, tea in hand. She savored the poem more than the tea, which Seras knew was an excellent, imported blend and Integra’s one luxury in the aftermath of the battle of London. She also ate the sandwich and fruit that Ms. Anvers had brought up, prompted by Seras’ long pause and meaningful glance.

 

Rather than dusting the crumbs from her fingers, Integra peeled off her gloves and held out her hands for the book when Seras finished the second part. She surrendered the old book and Integra took over, blue eye gliding over the lines, her voice a mellow roll over well-loved verses, soft brown hands cradling the cover and spine of the book. Seras propped her chin in her hand, leaning forward to soak in Integra’s enjoyment in the poem, drifting along the actual narrative until it ensnared her again, jerking her out of her trance.

 

“Is that a DEATH? and are there two?

Is DEATH that woman's mate?

 

 _Her_ lips were red, _her_ looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold:

Her skin was as white as leprosy,

The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,

Who thicks man's blood with cold…

 

Fear at my heart, as at a cup,

My life-blood seemed to sip!

The stars were dim, and thick the night…

 

One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,

Too quick for groan or sigh,

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,

And cursed me with his eye.

 

Four times fifty living men,

(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)

With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,

They dropped down one by one.

 

The souls did from their bodies fly,—

They fled to bliss or woe!

And every soul, it passed me by,

Like the whizz of my cross-bow!”

 

Integra’s voice was just as pleasant, the tempo of the poem unchanging, but Seras no longer saw the director in her wingback chair, book in hand; she was instead staring in the face of the ghouls that had once been the D-11 squad, their shriveled gray skin and dead eyes accusing and horrific. Then she was seeing the ghouls that had been Hellsing troops, people she’d worked with and respected, people she had torn apart with her bare hands, her teeth pulling limbs from torsos, leaving writhing, moaning, living corpses –

 

“Seras?”

 

With a quick shake of her head, Seras shoved the memories away, Integra bringing her back to herself yet again. “Sorry, just… woolgathering. Please keep going,” she said when Integra gave her a sharp look.

 

“Hmm,” Integra said doubtfully, but she did continue. “Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread…”

 

Quick shambling gray husks and blank gazes in familiar faces reappeared, but this time Seras shoved them away again swiftly. Integra liked this poem – liked it and wanted to share it with _her_. No matter what memories it stirred, Seras was determined to take whatever Integra offered.

 

....

 

He hit her hard, fist shattering the bones of her shoulder, but he’d targeted the left shoulder, next to her billowing shadows.

 

_That was stupid._

 

Quicker than thought, tendrils bit deep into his arm, hooking in like curved snake fangs, anchoring her. That probably made the damage to her shoulder worse since the force of impact wasn’t mitigated by moving with it, but it also kept him in place long enough that her fingers could sink into the socket of one eye, popping it along the way, and yank him sideways by the skull. Her shadows released him at the height of her swing, sending him flying from her bloody fingers.

 

He slid against the forest floor, skeletal frame flung about like a rag doll. Before she could take advantage, he had righted himself again and faced her with a manic, rictus grin. His eye regenerated as she watched and he rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck, staring at her as he did.

 

Then there were fangs before her eyes, jaw stretched wider than humanly possible and crowded with too many teeth, red eyes tracking her from the back of his throat. Instinct rather than conscious will made her intangible and his jaws snapped down on air rather than her skull. He stayed right on top of her incorporeal form, red eyes gleaming with mirth. “Nice trick, Police Girl,” he said, and despite the sneer he meant it. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in an automatic snarling response. Right now they were at a stalemate; keeping herself intangible took too much energy and focus to attack him with her shadows, but he couldn’t attack her, either. Stepping away seemed too much like retreating; stepping forward would put him at her back, invulnerable as she currently was, and instinct demanded she keep him in sight. _Damn it._

 

He noted her hesitation. “Indecisive, Seras? How _unlike_ you!” The mockingly sweet tone and the arrogant, carefree grin made her bristle. She didn’t realize she was growling until he tutted at her as if she were an errant child. His hand came up to shake a faux reproachful finger under her nose and she reacted without thinking again, lunging at it and biting clean through his wrist. His hand melted away to become shadow again and damn it all, he’d grabbed hold of her even as she’d bitten down. His teeth sank into her neck and she could feel his smug smile against her throat as the greedy bastard gulped down her blood. Flesh tore as she twisted and bit into his chest, gnawing through the flesh, aiming vaguely for his heart but mostly just trying to rip into him and cause as much damage as possible.

 

She thought briefly of a picture in one of Integra’s manuscripts – the ouroboros formed of two dragons in a book of alchemy. Something about the red elixir – Integra had shown her the woodcut illustrations and translated them for her when it arrived, a much-lauded addition to Hellsing’s library. She’d thought it silly that the dragons only bit each other’s tails when they had claws and fire and so many other options available to them – but here she was, in so very much the same position, being just as much of a ninny! To rectify that, she hooked clawed nails into his belly and yanked even as she called on her shadows, flaying his back as she attempted to disembowel him. This time he twisted and heaved to escape her grip, taking a chunk of her jugular with him and leaving part of his intestines in her hands. Arterial blood sprayed from her neck as he disappeared. Her shadows pulled the skin shut and sealed it as she cursed and spun, looking for him. He wasn’t in sight, but she could feel him lurking. She growled under her breath, searching with her third eye and finding _nothing_.

 

 _Damn that cat boy, anyway_ , she thought absently and viciously.

 

Seras flared her shadows out around her, forming something that was like a spider’s web but less substantial, like a miasma but more tangible, pushing so that it radiated out from her into the woods, billowing over jagged tree trunks, fallen trees, twisting roots, earth-bound rocks, terrified wildlife staying desperately still to avoid attention, a stream swollen by the recent rain –

 

As soon as he materialized again, her shadows found him. It took less than a thought for her shadows to locate him where he brushed up against black tendrils and then they converged, drowning him, contracting so swiftly and powerfully that she felt his ribs break beneath them. This time she grinned manically, lips pulled back inhumanly far to bare monstrous fangs and jaws gaping in a wolfish smile. Even as she curled her shadows into a tighter fist, though, he started melting out of her grasp into blobs of inky blackness and glowing red eyes. Each drop of shadow grew into a hound, a tidal surge of half-flesh dogs made more of teeth and thought than bone and sinew that shredded the filaments of her shadows and tore chunks from her. She fought back with bloody teeth and claws of her own even as her shadows formed razor sharp wire-like filaments to whirl and cut the familiars. Blood and flesh she sheared from the hounds congealed into the shape of a man again, dark hair curling into his shadows as he grabbed a handful of her shadows and yanked, pulling her off balance and stumbling closer to him before she regained her footing and turned on him again.

 

She had just inhaled to say something – she wasn’t sure what, but a threatening insult or insulting threat were pretty good guesses – when she sensed something in her periphery that made her freeze in place. Alarm and a tangle of deep emotions so muddled she couldn’t define them made her skin crawl and the hairs on her arm rise. She straightened, turning away from Alucard to peer through the dense underbrush, searching for what she’d sensed. Air displaced as Alucard moved to take advantage of her inattention until he, too, froze.

 

....

 

During the battle against Tubalcain

 

She was pretty sure he’d sent her to gather up the coffins to distract her from his call to Integra, but it hadn’t worked. Seras heard every word as she wrapped up the coffins and strapped them together. She’d taken the time to compose herself before lugging them into the room – they weren’t heavy, not to her, but they were unwieldy. And then almost as soon as she’d set them down she’d had to pick them back up again, dang it.

 

 _Where the hell am I supposed to get a helicopter?_ she wondered despairingly as she fought to finagle the bulky coffins through the far too narrow staircase. She probably would have worried more about the damage she was doing to the walls as she shoved the sturdy coffins around tight corners, but given the shouting and gunfire she could hear so many floors below, she figured that scraped and dented drywall would be the least of the hotel’s concerns.

 

“‘Follow me in fear through the darkest gloom,’ he says. ‘Steal a heli,’ he says. ‘I have to go check out,’ he says. Lord almighty, the man’s a drama queen,” she grumbled as she cleared the last flight of stairs. The door to the roof was, predictably, too narrow for the coffins. Fed up with everything in Brazil at the moment, she took the door off its hinges and then knocked down several feet of wall on either side. As soon as she’d dropped the coffins on the roof, she raced back downstairs for her Harkonnen.

 

Under the screaming and gunfire below, she could hear a dull squishing sound that made her faintly queasy. A quick peak over the side showed a wall of huge stakes impaling an entire squadron of Rio cops. Amidst that forest of pikes, Alucard was having a grand old time ripping apart humans and looking for the vampire behind all this. Blood rained from limbs tossed aside and it seeped from crumpled bodies and it dripped down long stakes

 

 _God_ , there was something desperately wrong with her. The knowledge that these men we so very much like the team she’d lost to the vicar in Cheddar tore at her, but the smell of gunpowder and blood made her salivate. She backed away from the edge, wishing she could just find someplace quiet to lay down and focus on getting the hunger back under control, but this was a firefight in a foreign country, not a training drill at the manor that got a little out of hand. Her clenched fist pressed hard against her belly, trying to still the ravening hunger that clawed at her, raking sharp, cold talons through her stomach and creeping up her throat.

 

She’d thought Integra would call him off, tell him to destroy the supernatural threat and leave the humans out of the fray – that was the entire purpose of Hellsing, wasn’t it? Protecting humans from supernatural threats? But Integra had unleashed Alucard instead. These masses of humans were a _hindrance_ to Hellsing and therefore acceptable collateral damage in Integra’s eyes; they were less than that to Alucard. The self-proclaimed monster viewed them as fodder, an amusing distraction.

 

Trying to talk sense into him hadn’t worked. It wouldn’t have worked on Integra, either, Seras figured. They had slipped into war somehow while she wasn’t looking – gone from hunting down rogue vampires and exterminating ghouls to fighting bloody pitched battles with massive civilian casualties. Even as her fangs sharpened with longing at the scent of blood, she railed against the senseless brutality of it.

 

“We must kill them! I cannot change that. No one can. That’s the sole truth. Not God, not the Devil, not me, not you.”

 

That might have been true for the vampire and the humans working for him, but those cops had been considered expendable. They hadn’t known what they were walking in to any more than she had those many weeks ago.

 

Alucard and Integra might not care about that, but they were warriors through and through. The Wild Geese didn’t care as long as they got paid – the mercenaries had told her all about their previous jobs; war was old hat to them. Walter had been through war, too, and his very practicality probably made him immune to her horror at the idea of waging war.

 

Seras Victoria had been extremely well trained in firearms and raid tactics, but she wasn’t a soldier. The prospect of going to war shook her sense of self, which she had maintained through the logic that she was just doing the same thing with a different organization: protecting people against threats they couldn’t face themselves, using specialized tools and unusual talents. That talent now included hitting targets from a mile away using her third eye, but she figured the means weren’t as important as the ends, which remained much the same. Now, facing war, she realized she’d read things wrong; her position at Hellsing made her irrevocably different from what she’d been before. Worse, the people around her who’d helped her get her bearings were so very different from her that she now felt that she didn’t know them at all, months of acquaintance be damned. She'd been accustomed to feeling lonely in a crowd as a child, but being on the force and then with Hellsing made her feel like part of a team. That feeling had been suddenly ripped from her with this realization about the people she'd come to rely on at Hellsing, just one more thing she lost as a vampire.

 

The card-throwing dandy and Alucard arrived on the roof, still fighting. Alucard’s wounds bled freely, which worried Seras; normally he’d have recollected all his blood. Even though she’d seen him survive beheading by silver bayonets, the ghostly cast to his always-pallid skin spooked her.

 

 _He doesn’t need help_ , she told herself. _He probably doesn’t even want your help._

 

He’d been so eager for the battle. He was basically invincible. He’d yelled at her that war meant kill or be killed and that it didn’t matter who they were fighting; he’d been so pleased when Integra told him to destroy them indiscriminately. She’d seen him fighting before; he loved nothing more than to let his opponents “kill” him for the sheer joy of seeing the fear in their eyes when he regenerated. Hell, he’d just done it to the SWAT unit downstairs.

 

But the way he was panting – and she could hear him muttering about the way he couldn’t stop bleeding.

 

He’d told her to stay out of it, to focus on getting the coffins and securing an escape route. He’d hidden her away in the wardrobe so the cops wouldn’t shoot at her – or so that she wouldn’t have to see him shoot them, or worse, shoot them herself. And then that intense look when he’d backed down after she’d protested, when he’d let her go and made that cryptic remark… “No. There it is. That’s it exactly. Let’s go, Seras.”

 

Alucard moved smoothly out of the way of Tubalcain’s exploding cards. She now had a clear line of fire at the vampire.

 

Seras wasn’t a soldier, but she’d always been a fighter.

 

She took the shot.

 

....

 

“Oh, please, don’t stop on my account,” Integra drawled sarcastically. She lit a cigar and took a long drag on it as she cast her gaze around the shattered trees and spilled blood.

 

Seras couldn’t name most of the tangled, thorny emotions she felt, but she definitely knew it was shame burning through her, pushing the rest aside. Integra’s cold, unimpressed tone made her feel like a recalcitrant child called to the principal’s office. She managed a quick glance at Alucard, but he was either bored or had a hell of a poker face because he didn’t seem effected by Integra’s disapproval at all. Seras managed another glance at Integra and then found her eyes magnetically drawn to the tree root by her boots.

 

There was a heaviness between Alucard and Integra that she knew from experience meant they were communicating without speaking – a language between the two of them developed from years together that Seras didn’t speak, a language of subtle expressions and the tilt of the head or the angle of the jaw. It had fallen right back into place as soon as Alucard returned, the thirty years absence inconsequential to their fluency in reading each other. She’d been locked out of the loop.

 

“Alucard, go home,” Integra said.

 

“Master –” he wheedled.

 

“ _Now_. And don’t leave the premises until I tell you to,” Integra added, knowing exactly what sort of tricks he’d pull. He huffed but complied.

 

Seras bit her lip and stayed quiet, waiting to see what Integra would do. Integra took another long inhale from the cigar before snuffing it and walking forward. Seras barely stopped herself from cringing, expecting to be upbraided. Instead, soft, gloveless hands cupped her face gently. Integra’s thumb wiped at a smear of blood – hers, Alucard’s, Seras didn’t know – as Integra tipped her face up. Seras still couldn’t meet her gaze.

 

Integra sighed deeply, preparing to speak, but Seras beat her to it.

 

“I’m sorry! I lost my temper, I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry!”

 

“Oh, Seras,” she said, and there was a warm, amused undertone that finally made Seras look up. “I’ve shot that bastard more times than I care to count. He’s had centuries to practice getting under the skin, so to speak, and he’s been needling both of us for weeks. This,” she gestured absently with one hand before bringing it back to cup Seras’ neck, “isn’t what worries me.”

 

Seras blinked. “It’s not?”

 

“No.” That piercingly blue eye studied her face closely. “You haven’t been yourself for months now. What’s wrong, Seras?”

 

“I don’t know,” Seras said despondently.

 

“Don’t lie to me, vampire,” Integra chided.

 

“I _don’t know_ ,” Seras said again, and this time she shifted her weight forward to bury her face against Integra’s shoulder. She realized far too late that her muddy, bloody face should have stayed well clear of Integra’s dove gray suit jacket, but before she could pull away, Integra’s hand cupped the back of her head and held her there. “I don’t know.” Her breath hitched, that tangled knot of emotions swallowing her up again. “I don’t know, I don’t know –” Seras scrunched her eyes shut tight, hoping to fight back the tears, but she felt them leak out anyway. Integra stroked her hair and made a soft, wordless crooning noise as Seras turned to press her face against Integra’s neck. She sucked in huge gulps of air, drawing in the smell of Integra and cigar smoke, barely aware that she repeated her litany as she leaned on Integra. “I don’t know.”   

 

....

 

30 years ago

 

The ringing silence in London hurt her ears.

 

It had been a few weeks since the attack on London, since the streets flooded with blood and the bombs fell. Those who didn’t die in the initial attack were evacuated immediately; the rescue teams sorted through rubble to find the trapped and injured as soon as the military declared the area clear enough to send them in.

 

Mostly they found the dead. By a week after the attack, there were no survivors left to be found, only corpses to be recovered and identified. Three weeks on, now, Seras took nightly patrols to make sure none of the newly recovered were ghouls, but the last few days had been dead quiet, so to speak, as even body recovery petered out.

 

Her steps echoed strangely. She vividly remembered the city before the attack, the noise and life of it, so hearing the soft thuds bouncing off of toppled brick and concrete put her on edge in a way no ghoul or vampire could. It felt haunted.

 

 _Don’t be silly, Seras. There’s no such thing as ghosts… or vampires. Or werewolves. Okay, maybe there_ are _ghosts, but they’re not likely to be able to hurt you._

 

There were, however, black dogs.

 

They gamboled through the wreckage, bounding to meet her. At first, she’d thought they were her Master’s hounds and had started eagerly scanning for him; she realized later they weren’t, just friendly ominous dogs, escorting souls from London to the hereafter. She’d asked Integra about taking them in and was told very sharply not to – for all that they frolicked like bear-sized puppies about her, their presence was dangerous to humans. They were completely silent unless they bayed to herd the souls of the dead to the next life; their paws pounded against the ground and left no prints, their tongues lolled as they panted but their breath made neither sound nor vapor, no matter how cold the night or how warm they felt when Seras patted them. Seras had the distinct impression that they were lonely, that they wanted company and affection as much as any mortal dog did but were usually only seen by the dying or terrified humans who ran from them. She showered them with attention to try to make up for the lack.

 

Shucks bumped into her roughly in his excitement, his mostly-corporeal body warm to her senses, shaggy fur slipping smoothly under her shadows. Pilot head-butted her playfully and nearly knocked her over, but Bugs braced against her back and kept her upright. She huffed with laughter and her shadows fractured into many hands, ruffling fur and tugging playful at perky ears. Eventually, Shucks and Bugs ran off again to get back to work, but Pilot padded beside her as she continued her patrol.

 

Seras probably could have stopped patrolling and left this job to Pip or even to the police unit she’d briefed on ghouls, but this time in London was her breathing time. Integra could spare her for a couple hours and didn’t begrudge her the nightly rounds, but patrolling gave Seras the excuse she needed to justify taking this time to stretch her legs and clear her head. She rested a hand on Pilot’s broad back and just walked, listening to the eerie, echoing city.

 

“Everybody left,” she told Pilot. Her words were barely more than a murmur, but they felt like boulders dropping into a pond for the effect it had on the silence. She fancied she angered the silence with her intrusion, but damnit, this was _her_ city and it was never meant to be silent. “Everybody left.” She kicked a football-sized chunk of concrete ahead of her the way she had skittered pebbles along her walks as a little girl. “Walter –” she choked on his name, grief and rage burning the words into slag in her throat. A deep breath helped dislodge it. “Walter said people stayed here all throughout the Blitz, you know. Were you here for that, Pilot?” The dog’s ears were perked to catch her voice and her tail wagged slowly, but she didn’t expect an answer from the great beast. “I bet you were busy then, too.” Several more blocks brought them to the Thames and they stared across the river at the remains of the Tower. Seras’ shadows sprouted wings and she swooped low over the river as Pilot bounded lightly over the surface of the water, racing her to the Traitor’s Gate. They walked past the damaged castle and Seras marveled at how much was left standing – then again, it was a fortress. The swell of human blood that flooded the Thames stained the stone walls of the Tower – red blood caked onto gray stone had turned to dark rusty brown, so thick it was flaky. Seras had heard people arguing over how much of a biohazard the blood was and how to most efficiently – and safely – remove it. “It’s _wrong_ ,” she complained to Pilot. They passed the London Wall. “There’s been people here for, blimey, two thousand years, give or take a few decades, and now everybody’s just… left.” The thought left a cold pit in her stomach. This was how bad it was when Hellsing won – if they hadn’t –

 

“Anyway,” she said, determined to head off that line of thinking. “I don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m used to people leaving, God knows I am, but this?” She shook her head. “It’s one thing to leave a person. People leave people all the time. And _some_ people leaving a city is normal, too, but usually more people come in at the same time. It’s as if someone drained the Thames and we’re left with the muck and fish bones instead of a river,” Seras grumbled. Pilot yawned widely in reply and Seras rolled her eyes.

 

“I’m sorry, am I boring you? Am I too maudlin for your refined tastes?” The chuffing breath Pilot heaved in response made Seras grin. “Oh, alright,” she said. “I guess it’s time for you to leave me, too.” Pilot’s great shaggy head rubbed against her belly, leaving dog fur and a long smear of drool. “Charming, that’s what you are. Simply charming.” A wide doggy grin revealed many sharp teeth and a blood red tongue. Seras gave her one last rough but affectionate ruffle through the dog’s thick fur before Pilot simply faded into the night, back to whatever the dogs did when she wasn’t around.

 

Seras sighed dramatically and kept walking, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore without company. She still wouldn’t leave London. She’d been born there, orphaned there, raised there, schooled there. Become a cop there. Trained there. She’d expected to die there, and while she hadn’t, she’d damned sure returned immediately after she died and now she wandered the streets, claiming it all over again. Everyone else could leave, but Seras was determined to stay. _Mine_ , she thought, and it felt right, even though the city felt wrong. It felt so right she said it aloud. “You’re mine and I’m not going anywhere. You hear me? You’re _my_ city and I don’t leave what’s mine. I fought too hard for you to leave.” Her words stirred stagnant air without reply, but she didn’t expect or want one. She made one last circuit around the inner city before returning home to Integra and Hellsing at the outskirts of London.

 

....

 

“I can’t leave,” Seras said, staring blankly at Integra. The old woman stood by the open door of the car, foot tapping as she waited. “We’re here for training. I’m running it.”

 

“Smitty might have had to return to Hellsing, but Llewellyn is here. Not to mention Mills. You don’t need to stay to run things here, you’ve already got it set up.” Seeing Seras open her mouth to argue, Integra rolled her eye and said, “You made me start delegating decades ago, now you get to try it. Stop coddling your captains and make them do their work. Now get in the damn car, Seras.”

 

“But I promised –”

 

“ _Seras_.” Exasperated affection warmed Integra’s voice, despite her terseness. Seras trudged forward.

 

“This is stupid. I’m stupid. If I hadn’t lost my damn temper…” Integra hauled Seras forward by the collar of her jacket and shoved her down into the car. She ducked inside, sat beside her, and closed the door before the vampire could try to make an escape. “Seat belt,” Seras prompted absently. Integra complied. Then she rolled up the partition window between them and the driver to give them some privacy and pulled Seras down so the vampire’s head rested in her lap.

 

The car started down the road as Integra stroked her vampire’s hair away from her face, giving her an unobstructed view of her red eyes. “We’re going home the scenic way. I imagine we’ll stop in Cambridge for the day, maybe even spend a night or two there.”

 

“I thought you came in on a helicopter and that we’d go the same way.”

 

“I did, but we’re not. There’s no rush.”

 

They were quiet for long moments. Little by little, Seras relaxed as she breathed in Integra’s scent and basked in her attention. That deep sense of peace that Seras associated with Integra seeped into her, taking the sharp corners off the world and everything in it, leaving things lively without being overwhelming. She’d asked Integra once if there was a word for that feeling without explaining why she wanted to know. Ataraxia, Integra had told her. Or maybe equanimity. Seras thought it was both of those things with a good dose of homey thrown in for good measure.

 

When Integra did speak, her voice was low and her tone steadfast. “Whatever this is, you’re having trouble identifying it because you’re trying to make out too much at once. Pick one thing that’s bothering you and let’s start from there.”

 

Seras stared up at the roof of the car for long minutes, trying to pick one thread out of the tangled knot. The car bumped and swayed down the road. Integra tugged absently on a lock of Seras’ hair. Finally, Seras tracked down one particularly sore spot and pinned it down.

 

“He might have had you first, but I’ve had you longer,” she growled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, writing this chapter was like pulling teeth. Also, I lied, I thought this would be 3 parts, it now looks like it will be 4 or 5.
> 
> Anyway, if anyone's interested, the full text of Rime of the Ancient Mariner is available [here](https://tinyurl.com/y5xbafb5) and there's a recording of Ian McKellan, AKA Gandalf and Magneto, reading it aloud [here](https://tinyurl.com/zfjsp4a). It's not terribly long and it really does have a good rhythm to it.
> 
> The ouroboros image Seras is thinking of is from _Compendium alchymist_ and is the third emblem, The Separation and Conjunction for the Red Elixir. The emblem also shows a Mars and Venus creating mercury as part of creating the red elixir. There's so much there that fits oh so well, don't you think? You can see a [ black and white woodprint](https://tinyurl.com/y57bal2d) or a [hand painted, full color version](https://tinyurl.com/y2thbqvh).
> 
> I spent way, waaaaay longer than I care to admit trying to decide if I thought Integra would be able to get funding for a microfiche machine before I decided she probably couldn't after London got attacked, so... camera digitization.


End file.
